John Cage

John Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. In 1930, after travelling for several months in Europe, he embarked on a year's study of music in the USA under Richard Buhling, Adolf Weiss and Henry Cowell. In 1934-36 he studied under Amold Schönberg. In 1945 he enrolled at Columbia University, New York, in study Philosophy and Classical Indian Music, simultaneously studying Zen Buddhism with Daisetz Taitaro Suzuki. Cage taught extensively throughout his career and had a profound influence on several generations of artists. In 1941 he taught Experimental Music at the Chicago School of Art; in 1948 he taught at Black Mountain College; and from 1956 to 1960 he taught at the New School of Social Research, New York. In the academic year 1988-89 he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures at Harvard University. Cage received numerous prizes and awards for his work, among these an Honorary Doctorate at the Californian Institute of Arts (1986) and the Kyoto Prize awarded by the city of Kyoto (1989). John Cage died in New York in 1992. 

Cage is among the most important creative figures of the twentieth century. As a musician, composer, teacher, artist and as a friend of Marcel Duchamp, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Nam June Paik and others, he had a significant impact on the evolution of art forms that straddled the conventionally perceived boundaries of music, dance, the visual arts and theatre, and that disproved the supposed distinction between 'high' and 'low' art. Alongside Duchamp, Cage was one of the first artists to combine various media in his work, and to produce what could truly be called multimedia art. Of crucial importance in Cage's work are compositional procedures based on allowing chance to determine the choices made and aleatory methods of composing. He was first alerted to this notion through discovering the highly complex counting processes informing the Chinese oracle book, the »I Ching«. This showed Cage that it was possible to work in a 'non-intentional' manner; that is to say, to keep personal elements out of the work and, at the same time, to offer performers a greater degree of freedom in their interpretations. In his musical compositions, Cage used silence and emptiness, non-tones and noises occurring by chance in both the immediate and the more distant environment together with instrumentally generated sounds. In Cage's work, we find a union of the unregulated, playful and anarchic elements of Dada and of fluxus (Cage had a great influence on the origin and evolution of this last) with the meditative, indifferent and disciplined character of Zen Buddhism and the wisdom of Oriental philosophy.

Cage made his first experiments in painting in the 1920s. Thereafter, for several decades, the scores and musical notation he produced were themselves effectively 'drawings' - instructions concerning musical processes expressed in visual form. Cage's engagement with the visual arts occurred, however, predominantly during the last fifteen years of his life. Starting in 1978, he produced series of prints (mostly in small editions), from 1983 drawings, and from 1987 watercolours. In 1983 he embarked on a series of drawings that he was to continue until his death: they were devoted to the Japanese Zen garden (»ryoan-ji«). They consist of a network of overlapping circles made by drawing around pebbles with pencils varying in thickness and hardness. The number and arrangement of the stones on the rough drawing paper (which has a
rectangular shape) and the choice of pencil type are decided after consulting the »I Ching«. For the last drawings that Cage produced before his death, the »Edible Drawings« of 1989-91, Cage used paper made by hand from plants, algae, ginger roots and other such materials.

[Frauke Syamke, 1997]