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Energy That Matters: John Cage


  • Jean Baudrillard
  • Charles Bukowski
  • John Cage

    The Godfather of Fluxus. John Cage may never have been a member of the Fluxus movement as it existed under the auspices of George Maciunas, but Cage was a seminal figure for Fluxus and for all postmodern art that came after him. Cage made the observation, that in retrospect seems very simple, but which in its effect on arts and culture was enormous, that music consisted of nothing but sound. One way of composing music was to use the standard European music notation system. But since music was nothing but sound, Cage reasoned that it could be composed using any sounds. Natural sounds, manufactured sounds. Sounds usually thought of as noise. Even silence, and the sounds that occur within a "silent" environment. While artists working around the same time were already looking at paintings as being composed only of paint on canvas, and drawings as being composed purely of marks on paper, Cage opened the door much wider - to art being constructed out of anything that could be sensed by humans. Therefore the role of the artists expanded to include any person who created things that could be sensed by other people. In fact since a musical composition could consist solely of the score for a performance, art could also now exist solely as the score (i.e. Fluxus event scores) for constructing an object, performance, or Intermedia composition.

  • Leonard Cohen
  • Marcel Duchamp
  • Allen Ginsberg
  • Albert Einstein
  • Karl Marx
  • Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Andy Warhol


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