John Cage
The composer and artist John Cage was an important influence on the development of Fluxus in the United States. Cage was born in Los Angeles, California in 1912 and died in 1992. His influence was imparted through his work and through his teaching. In his work, he was known for pioneering the use of silence as a compositional tool. His most renowned work in this theme being 4'33", which consisted entirely of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence from the stage. David Bernstein writes in Corner Magazine:The description of 4'33"--the musical analog for Robert Rauschenberg's white canvases--as a composition without sound is misleading. 4'33" was not merely a philosophical statement without any real musical content. Cage has maintained that an audience experiencing 4'33" has an opportunity to listen, in an aesthetic way, to what there is to hear. He believed that we are all free at any time and in any place to listen, in a musical way, to the sounds that are around us. He eliminated the distinction between musical and environmental sound, thus achieving a fusion of art and life in a musical context. Reference Article
Works like 4'33" encourage the audience to be mindful of all of the ambient sounds around them. Cage discovered that it is actually impossible for us to experience absolute silence. Even when placed into artificially created environments in which physical silence is close to complete, people become aware of the sounds that their own bodies make as living organisms. The pulse of our heartbeats, the 'ringing' in our ears, and the sounds made as we shift position, suddenly take on prominence, as external environmental sounds diminish. Cage was also interested in Zen Buddhism which encourages the type of mindfulness expressed in works like 4'33".
Cage's educational contibution is exemplified by his work at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s and at The New School of Social Research in New York in the late 1950s. His students at The New School included many of the early Fluxus artists, including, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow, and Jackson Mac Low. John Cage's work was featured at the first "official" Fluxus event in Europe which was organized by George Maciuanas. George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Allison Knowles, and Emmet Williams, among others also performed at this event. In 1989 John Cage wrote an autobiography which is available at http://www.newalbion.com/artists/cagej/autobiog.html. In an excerpt from this autobiography, he describes himself:
Neither of my parents went to college. When I did, I dropped out after two years. Thinking I was going to be a writer, I told Mother and Dad I should travel to Europe and have experiences rather than continue in school. I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
It was at Black Mountain College that I made what is sometimes said to be the first happening. The audience was seated in four isometric triangular sections, the apexes of which touched a small square performance area that they faced and that led through the aisles between them to the large performance area that surrounded them. Disparate activities, dancing by Merce Cunningham, the exhibition of paintings and the playing of a Victrola by Robert Rauschenberg, the reading of his poetry by Charles Olsen or hers by M. C. Richards from the top of a ladder outside the audience, the piano playing of David Tudor, my own reading of a lecture that included silences from the top of another ladder outside the audience, all took place within chance-determined periods of time within the over-all time of my lecture. It was later that summer that I was delighted to find in America's first synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, that the congregation was seated in the same way, facing itself. From John Cage: An Autobiographical Statement.
We can readily make the connections between Cage and Fluxus from the excerpt above. We can also see how John Cage continues to inform and to influence the work or artists, writers, composers, and musicians today.
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