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Supporting the Cage
Andy Weaver
University of Alberta
aweaver@ualberta.ca
(c) 2004 Andy Weaver.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writings through
John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.
1. Agree or disagree with his aesthetics, his ideas, or his politics,
no one seriously engaged in studying the arts of the twentieth
century can afford to ignore John Cage or his wide-ranging body of
work. His influence on experimental forms of music is well
documented, but his achievements and influence in the fields of
literature, visual arts, and film are also significant and worthy
of more discussion. Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry,
and Art, edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, is an
attempt, as Bernstein states in his introduction, to "give readers
a sense of the importance of Cage's creative activities in a
variety of fields and an understanding of how much research has
yet to be done" (6). It is both the book's greatest achievement
and most significant failure that it accomplishes both of these aims.
2. The book is an extension of the "Here Comes Everybody: The Music,
Poetry, and Art of John Cage" conference, which took place at
Mills College in Oakland, California in the autumn of 1995, and so
"was the first international assemblage of scholars and creative
artists to examine Cage's work after his death on August 12, 1992"
(1); indeed, the idea for the conference developed less than a
year after Cage's death (ix). This link between Cage's death and
the conference is carried over in the essays included in Writings,
as almost all of the authors implicitly focus on the absence of
John Cage, the man, either through intricately describing his
working practices, relating personal anecdotes about Cage,
describing what Cage meant to them and their work, or, sometimes,
by mixing all three of these perspectives. For this reason, the
book becomes a celebration of John Cage's life and his art.
Perhaps due to the short time that passed between Cage's death and
the germination of this project, the book is, for the most part,
more of a wake for a great man than a critical examination of
Cage's works
3. This is not to say that there isn't useful information in the
book; each essay offers interesting facts about Cage's creative
process, the performance of his work, and the scoring of his work.
The problem is that there is often a lack of critical examination
of many of these facts. The result is that the essays in the book
could be divided into two distinct types: those offering
ideological critiques of Cage's work and those documenting Cage's
formal procedures. The former engage intellectually with Cage's
aesthetics, his beliefs, and his politics and seek to open up ways
to engage Cage's work critically; they offer important insights
into how Cage's personal beliefs, such as his devotion to Zen,
chance, and political and social anarchy, both affected his work
and offer insights into the works themselves. The second type of
essays, those documenting Cage's creative process, generally
avoids issues of ideology in an attempt to describe objectively
how Cage created his works. These essays, it seems to me, are less
valuable, precisely because they refuse to deal with the issues
that Cage found so important in life and art; they focus on Cage,
not on his works, and so they fail to open up avenues of
investigation into Cage's music, visual art, or literary texts.
4. The book starts quite strongly. The first essay, by David W.
Bernstein, examines Cage's music in relation to the large umbrella
terms "avant-garde," "modernism," and "postmodernism." Bernstein
offers a nuanced investigation of Cage's art and his politics in
order to highlight both the experimental as well as the
traditional aspects of Cage's music. Bernstein argues against the
unexamined conflation of experimentation with postmodernism and
tradition with modernism, instead showing how Cage exemplified
aspects of both those terms. By drawing on the influence that the
early avant-garde, especially dadaism but also futurism, had on
Cage, Bernstein argues persuasively that Cage's chance-based
musical works do indeed have a distinct political agenda:
when considering Cage's compositional methods, one finds that
the postmodern and the modern coexist without contradiction.
The same is true of Cage's political and social agenda.
Through his redefinition of musical form Cage created works
modeling desirable political and social structures. He was
able to renew the modernist project dedicated to political and
social change through art using postmodernist artistic
techniques. As we assess Cage's role within the development of
twentieth-century thought and musical style and intensify the
critical evaluation of his creative output, it is crucial that
we consider both the traditional and the radical aspects of
his aesthetics and compositional style. This formidable task
may very well occupy scholars for many years to come. (40)
The essay refuses to categorize Cage within the unproductive
binaries that Cage himself constantly railed against; the result
is an appreciation of the complex balancing job Cage performed as
a political artist who avoided politics in his art and as a man
who respected earlier traditions at the same time that he worked
to dismantle their influences. Bernstein addresses the interplay
between Cage's political anarchy and his use of chance operations,
and, more importantly, he historicizes Cage within a continuum.
Cage, Bernstein argues, openly borrowed from earlier avant-garde
movements while he also updated their methods; he remained
committed to the modernist avant-garde's belief in social
improvement through art, but refocused artistic practice around an
anarchistic refusal to engage in oppositional politics.
5. Jonathan D. Katz, in the essay that follows Bernstein's, expands
on Cage's political beliefs and strategies while refocusing the
area of investigation onto and through Cage's closeted
homosexuality. Katz proposes that Cage's silence over his own
sexuality strengthened his interest both in the use of silence in
music and in Eastern philosophies such as Zen, which stress the
positive aspects of silence. Biographical criticism is a dangerous
method to use when dealing with an artist like Cage, who attempted
to remove as much of his personality from his work as he could,
but Katz offers a convincing argument as to why he believes this
approach is appropriate: "there is a substantial difference
between saying that the work is not about the life
(antiexpressionism) and saying that the life has nothing to do
with the work. There are, after all, modes of revelation of self
that have nothing to do with expressionism" (47). Here Katz
distinguishes between conventional biographical criticism, which
uses the artist's life to explain the meaning of a work of art,
and a criticism that acknowledges the importance of biography to
the interests and predispositions from which an artist will draw
when producing art. Katz deftly uses Cage's homosexuality, or more
specifically his refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality, as the
primary reason for Cage's use of silence in his works. From this
starting point, Cage became increasingly interested in Zen's
belief that silence was necessary to inner harmony, since "Zen
repositioned the closet, not as a source of repression or anxiety,
but as a means to achieve healing; it was in not talking
about--and hence not reifying--one's troubles that healing began"
(45). Katz also points out the revolutionary nature of Cage's use
of silence, considering that the use of silence was developed
during the height of public popularity for abstract expressionism,
an art movement that concentrated on creating grand Romantic myths
about artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. But
perhaps most importantly, Katz draws a parallel between Cage's
silence and his political beliefs. Like Bernstein, Katz argues
that Cage's art was implicitly political; for Katz, silence
provided Cage with a way to critique society's values without
engaging in oppositional politics, something that Cage believed
only perpetuated what was supposedly being argued against:
silence was much more than conventionally unmusical; it
provided a route toward an active challenge of the assumptions
and prejudices that gave rise to homophobic oppression in the
first place. For Cage, silence was an ideal form of
resistance, carefully attuned to the requirements of the cold
war consensus, at least in its originary social-historical
context. There are both surrender and resistance in these
silences, in relation not of either/or but of both/and[...].
That Cage's self-silencing was in keeping with the
requirements of the infamously homophobic McCarthy era should
not obscure the fact that it was also internally and
ideologically consistent with his larger aesthetic politics.
(53-4)
While Katz's essay does not deal with all of the political aspects
of Cage's work (for example, an analysis of Cage's commitment to
political anarchism would have been interesting in this context),
Katz effectively brings to the forefront the often-overlooked
political aspects of Cage's work.
6. Austin Clarkson's essay, "The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage
and the Transpersonal," offers interesting insights into how
Cage's music was presentational, not representational.
Presentational arts, Clarkson argues, create their own codes of
meaning as they are expressed, while representational arts rely on
a prior understanding of the codes by both the artist and the
recipients. For this reason, Clarkson argues that Cage was not
avant-garde; the avant-gardists still believed their art to be
representational, since they "took their works to be fully
realized creations and not experiments in the sense of trials or
tests" (66). Clarkson's emphasis on the creative role of the
audience in the presentational arts, a belief that Cage held, is
an important point, and it might allow Clarkson to draw
connections between Cage's music and other contemporary fields
that share this belief, such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (or even
Cage's own poetry). However, Clarkson does not draw these
connections and remains somewhat narrowly focused on the world of
music. Moreover, Clarkson's assertion that Cage was purely an
experimental artist and not an avant-gardist reinforces the strict
and rather unhelpful divisions between aesthetic camps, divisions
that all of Cage's mature work attempted to undercut. Unlike
Bernstein and Katz, who work to show how these boundaries are far
more fluid than critics would admit, Clarkson mans the barricades.
For example, Clarkson does not address the fact that the
conflation between art and life that he states lies at the heart
of presentational art also forms the core of the historical
avant-garde movements.[1 <#foot1>] Moreover, he also overlooks the
connection between Cage's political and social anarchy and his
desire to make the audience part of the creative element of the
work. Still, despite these drawbacks, Clarkson's focus on the
creative relationship called for by presentational art is an
important point, especially since he stresses that both the
audience and the artist must learn to adapt to these new roles.
7. Bernstein's, Katz's, and Clarkson's essays are particularly
illuminating because they demonstrate that an awareness of Cage's
aesthetic and political beliefs adds to the levels of possible
meaning in all of Cage's post-1950 work. These writers focus on
explaining and expanding possible nuances in the works through a
knowledge of Cage's personal beliefs. However, most of the
remaining essays abandon this practice of theorizing levels of
meaning in Cage's oeuvre in favor of merely describing Cage's
compositional processes. The result is that, while useful facts
are offered, there are very few moments of true critical insight
into Cage's aesthetics or his works in the bulk of the book.
8. In the essay "Cage as Performer," Gordon Mumma offers an
interesting but standard brief biography of Cage as a performer.
Deborah Campana, in "As Time Passes," discusses how time remained
central to Cage's compositional strategies throughout his
different musical periods, but she offers no ideas about why this
was so or what light it might shed on his work. In "David Tudor
and the Solo for Piano," John Holzapfel discusses Tudor's active
role in interpreting Cage's music, stressing the collaborative
nature of their relationship but offers no thoughts on how this
affects Cage's music. Jackson Mac Low offers a necessarily brief
and admittedly limited discussion of Cage's writings in "Cage's
Writings up to the Late 1980s." Mac Low argues that Cage never
sought to expunge personal decisions from his writings, but the
broad overview that Mac Low offers doesn't allow for in-depth
analysis.
9. The collection also includes the transcripts from two panel
discussions at the "Here Comes Everybody" conference. The panel on
"Cage's Influence" was composed of Gordon Mumma (chair), Allan
Kaprow, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, Alvin Curram, and Maryanne
Amasher. More so than most of the pieces included, this discussion
is openly laudatory of Cage; it offers few insights and serves
more as a chance for those involved to thank Cage publicly for
opening avenues of investigation that allowed them to form their
careers. In fact, they all agree that Cage's influence was more
indirect, through his role as a trailblazer, than direct. The
second panel discussion, "Cage and the Computer," offers more
insight, but in terms of detailing Cage's compositional practices
rather than advancing any theoretical insights into the importance
of the computer to Cage. Composed of James Pritchett (chair),
James Tenney, Frances White, and Andrew Culver (Cage's
long-serving computer assistant), the panel describes how early
work with computers developed, but mostly this piece is
interesting for Culver's anecdotes about how Cage worked with the
computer: he didn't. Culver did all of the computer work himself,
finding out what Cage wanted and then making it happen.
10. Henning Lohner's discussion of "The Making of Cage's One" closes
the book. It is an interesting blend of interview, personal
anecdote, documentation, and critical discussion on the topic of
Lohner's collaboration with Cage on the experimental film One
(Cage's last major work). The piece serves as a biography of the
collaboration, an elegy (Cage died after the film was completed
but before it was premiered), and as a witness to Cage's
compositional strategies. Moreover, it is a fractured piece of
writing, paratactically juxtaposing interviews with Cage,
documentation surrounding the film, anecdotes of working with
Cage, and thoughts on the medium of film. As such, it is the only
non-linear piece of writing in the book (Clarkson does attempt
something different in his essay, where he includes a series of
quotes from Cage after his essay, but that essay is
straightforward in terms of structure). This point leads me to one
of the major drawbacks of this collection: there is too much
similarity and consensus among the writers and essays included.
11. Considering the short time-span between Cage's death and the
germination of the conference from which this book sprang, it is
hardly surprising that the essayists came together to praise Cage,
not to bury him. However, considering Cage's incessant search for
experimentation in all of his artistic endeavors, it seems a poor
tribute to him to ignore the practices and aesthetics that he
worked so hard to establish. Cage, for example, was a noted
anarchist (a fact rarely addressed or even acknowledged in most of
the essays); part of his desire to do away with the conventional
structures of music, language, and the visual arts sprang directly
from his belief that these structures upheld conventional opinions
about society, opinions that Cage certainly did not share. For
example, Cage often stated his preference for "nonsyntaxed"
language: "Due to N. O. Brown's remark that syntax is the
arrangement of the army, and Thoreau's that when he heard a
sentence he heard feet marching, I became devoted to nonsytactical
'demilitarized' language" (Introduction). The connection between
doing away with the accepted codes of language and critiquing the
status quo is obvious in Cage's statement; for the authors in the
book to undertake such standard investigations of Cage and his
work is to turn away from his implicit critiques of logical
communication and stifle these critiques under the weight of
convention. Moreover, Cage constantly and often proudly
contradicted himself; this was not merely an attempt to be
difficult or inscrutable (both ideas were tied in Cage's mind with
the Romantic myth of the artist, and were to be avoided at all
cost).[2 <#foot2>] Cage's contradictions came from his distrust of
consensus (a point which only Bernstein and Katz make), a distrust
that arose partly from his belief in anarchy (which holds that
reifications of any type, even personal characteristics, should be
avoided in favor of openness to circumstances), and partly from
his interest in Zen (which states that logic is not the only way,
or indeed the best way to understand the world). It would be a far
greater tribute to Cage and his work if his critics here openly
debated the ideas, importance, and merit of Cage's work. As he so
often stated, Cage was not interested in creating art, which in
his mind was dead and reified; however, the consistently laudatory
tone of the essays implicitly moves Cage's works toward that
category, toward installing him as another Great Artist within the
canon.[3 <#foot3>]
12. Perhaps the greatest drawback to the collection, though, can be
illustrated in relation to the two essays not yet discusssed:
Constance Lewallen's "Cage and the Structure of Chance" and Ray
Kass's "Diary: Cage's Mountain Lake Workshop, April 8-15, 1990."
Coincidentally, both of these essays address Cage's visual works;
this, however, isn't the problem. Both Lewallen and Kass attempt
to detail Cage's creative process, and it is this attempt that
leads to the problem: both essays focus on Cage, the man as
artist, and, as such, both essays undercut Cage's attempt to
divorce his own ego from his work. Indeed, neither Lewallen nor
Kass deal critically with Cage's works at all. Instead, they focus
on Cage's creative process in minute detail, cataloging his every
decision. The result is that, although Cage does appear to be
rather idiosyncratic, he is once again reshaped in the critics'
minds as a Great Artist. For example, note the laudatory tone and
the emphasis on Cage the Artist (not on the works that Cage
happened to produce) in the following:
Cage managed to challenge just about all of Western culture's
received ideas about what art is. If, from the Renaissance on,
art has been regarded as a means of communication, Cage
instead defined art as self-alteration, a means to "sober the
mind." If art has served to give form to the chaos of life's
experiences, he created an art that as nearly as possible
combines with, rather than gives shape to, life. If art has
been regarded as a giver of truths through the "self-expressed
individuality of artist," Cage saw it rather as an exploration
of how nature itself functions as a means to open the mind and
spirit to the beauty of life with a minimum of artistic
expression or interpenetration. Finally, if art has
traditionally expressed meaning through symbol or metaphor, he
preferred that viewers provide their own meaning according to
their individual personality and experience. (Lewallen 242-3)
One can't help but feel that no matter what "art has been regarded
as," for Lewallen, Cage would have heroically challenged it. I
don't mean to downplay Cage's sense of experimentation, but the
Romantic myth of the artist is strikingly apparent in both
Lewallen's and Kass's pieces (and runs implicitly through most of
the other essays). Lewallen refuses to contextualize Cage, and
thus there is no sense of how Cage learned from others (Suzuki,
Fuller, Thoreau, Kropotkin, etc.) the challenges that he put into
place. This decontextualization fuels the transformation of Cage
from experimenter in the arts into one of the reified,
understandable Artists of the Canon by writing the narrative of
Cage's life and artistic achievements within the frame of the
grand, solitary, creative genius. Not only does this
transformation violate Cage's beliefs, but it also serves to tame
his challenges, which become recuperated within the framework of
Art (Peter Bürger and Paul Mann, for example, both describe how
the art world recuperated the challenges against the institution
of art made by the avant-garde movements by first claiming these
challenges /as/ art). Furthermore, Cage's works are themselves
overlooked in an attempt to install him firmly within the
tradition of artistic revolution, a type of artistic
anti-tradition that in every way deeply depends on what it
supposedly is trying to undermine.
13. In the end, what a book like Writings through John Cage's Music,
Poetry, and Art does is to display the conservatism of most
criticism of experimental art. Despite the constant challenges
offered by artists in all of the different media--challenges which
Cage in many ways helped to nurture and perpetuate--critics refuse
to adapt either the form or the content of their discussions. As
such, the critics play a front-line role in recuperating
experimental art and artists such as John Cage. Having said that,
I'm not entirely sure how to avoid playing this role; however, we
might learn from the example of the experimental artists
themselves and break down the conventions of academic criticism.
If Cage taught us nothing else, it is that there are ways outside
of conventional logic to understand the world and all things in
it; perhaps, then, it is time for critics at least to gesture
toward the idea that conventional logic is not necessarily the
most appropriate nor the only way to engage with experimental art.
14. Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art could serve as
a useful introduction to John Cage's work, especially in the field
of music. It contains many useful facts about his working process;
however, this raw data is not examined effectively by the
essayists included in this book. Aside from the first three essays
and a few of the later ones, there is little here that will
significantly expand the way readers might encounter John Cage's
works. What the book points to is the divide in Cage studies
between those critics offering ideological critiques of his works,
critiques which actively engage with the ideas and beliefs that
Cage brought to his works, and those who focus on Cage himself. In
the end, Writings shows that the focus must shift from the latter
to the former if studies of Cage are going to increase the
critical appreciation of John Cage's music, poetry, and art.
Department of English
University of Alberta
aweaver@ualberta.ca
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Peter Bürger, for example, sees the conflation of art
and life as one of the fundamental tenets of the early
avant-garde. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, he states that "the
European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the
status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an
earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is
unassociated with the life praxis of men" (49).
2 <#ref2>. Take, for example, this exchange between Richard
Kostelanetz and Cage in Kostelanetz's Conversing With Cage:
[Kostelanetz] Once someone asked you a very dull question,
trying to show that you had been inconsistent in a line of
reasoning, and I remember that with that marvelous laugh of
yours you said, 'Well, you won't find me consistent.'
[Cage] Emerson felt this way about consistency, you know; but
our education leads us to think that it's wrong to be
inconsistent. All consistency is, really, is getting one idea
and not deviating from it, even if the circumstances change so
radically that one ought to deviate [...]. (45)
3 <#ref3>. Cage made it clear that he did not want to create art,
which, like the dadaists, he saw as cut-off from life:
I RATHER THINK THAT CONTEMPORARY MUSIC WOULD BE THERE IN THE
DARK TOO, BUMPING INTO THINGS, KNOCKING OTHERS OVER AND IN
GENERAL ADDING TO THE DISORDER THAT CHARACTERIZES LIFE (IF IT
IS OPPOSED TO ART) RATHER THAN ADDING TO THE ORDER AND
STABILIZED TRUTH BEAUTY AND POWER THAT CHARACTERIZE A
MASTERPIECE (IF IT IS OPPOSED TO LIFE). AND IS IT? YES IT IS.
(Silence 46)
Works Cited
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Cage, John. Introduction. Writing Through Finnegans Wake. Spec.
supplement to James Joyce Quarterly. Vol. 15, U of Tulsa Monograph
Ser. 16. N.p.: n.p., 1978.
---. Silence. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1973.
Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing With Cage. New York: Limelight, 1988.