MUSICAGE. John Cage

Yes, it [“Art Is Either …”] is all from words of Jasper Johns, but they’re used with chance operations in such a way that they make different connections than they did when he said them. On the other hand, they seem to reinforce what he was saying … almost in his way. And why that should surprise me I don’t know because all of the words are his. (laughs) But they make different connections. And I mistrusted it at first, or rather I didn’t want him to be unhappy about it, because it was all his words. So I didn’t want to put, so to speak, false words in his mouth, false connections. Before publishing it or delivering it, I read it to him and he was delighted with it—so there was no problem.

      JR: Did he hear anything new in it?

      JC: I didn’t ask him. But whether he did or not, he hasn’t objected to my reading it. You know, he doesn’t himself give lectures about his work, so it serves … it could, from his point of view, serve a purpose.

      JR: Better than sending out a surrogate lecturer, (laughter) Would you give some examples of specific pieces of art or performances that changed the way you saw things, that were models for you in some sense.

      JC: Yes. The first one that I remember is very striking. I was in a gallery looking at the early ’40s white paintings of Mark Tobey, and in particular one which had no representational elements at all, which was just white writing. And I left the gallery, which was then on 57th Street, and I went down to Madison Avenue—I think the bus then went in both directions—I was waiting for the bus and I happened to look at the pavement I was standing on and I couldn’t tell the difference between that and the Tobey. Or I had the same pleasure looking at the pavement. And yet I was, I was determined—I was very poor at the time—and I was determined to buy the Tobey, on the installment plan, which I did. I paid five dollars a week for about two years. And yet I had learned from Tobey himself, and then from his painting, that every place that you look is the same thing. You don’t really need the Tobey. (laughs) But you need it to tell you that, I guess.

      JR: To remind you.

      JC: To transform you. That happens of course with sound. It happens in all the various ways, it happens in different ways so that you, you notice different things than you had noticed before. See, this was just sort of noticing the pavement itself, but sometimes art seems to transform, seems to become something other than itself—the pavement doesn’t remain the pavement, but gets to be more like the art, hmm? I think then you need more of an environment than just the pavement.

      JR: You need more for what?

      JC: More relationship. Different things. Because so much art has the characteristic of connections between things. So that connections are different from the simple thing of Tobey’s white writing which is like one thing. It introduces you to the one thing—like the pavement. But the relationship arts can introduce you to other kinds of relationships.

      JR: By “relationship arts” what do you mean?

      JC: Well, when art seems to be dealing not with one thing like white, as in Tobey or Robert Ryman, but is dealing with many shapes and colors. You see? Then you begin to notice different kinds of relationships between all those things as they are mirrored in your daily experience. You notice them again. You recognize them, (pause) I wonder if I can give an example of that. I’m not sure. I mean to say, one from my experience. I don’t remember one right now.

      JR: That certainly happened to me after my first time at a Cunningham-Cage performance. I walked out into the street and—

      JC: And you could see movement—

      JR: Movement, and hear the sound in a new way. And connect the movement and the sound, though that connection was nonintentional. It was a complete transformation. And I think of first seeing Helen Frankenthaler’s large canvases—the edges of her shapes and the spaces in between. After seeing her canvases I started noticing relationships between edges. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

      JC: Yes, that’s what I mean. This leads to the relation of art to the enjoyment of life. Which is what must be its purpose!

      JR: If not, then why?

      JC: Then we’re in the wrong place. (laughter)

      JR: That’s what I love about [John] Dewey’s Art as Experience. That’s really what it’s all about for him.

      JC: Yes.

      JR: Dewey’s notion in Art as Experience is that art, in reconnecting us with our sensory nature, revitalizes us in our connection with the world. And this is the purpose of art. He interestingly comes to this from a negative point of view—his feeling that we are dangerously susceptible to emotional fragmentation, that we tend to become alienated from our sensory selves and from the forms of the physical world around us—our natural environment. His positive assertion is that art can awaken and focus our attention, and it does this by drawing us to attend to a particular kind of order.

      JC: Does he specify that in any way? What does he mean by order?

      JR: Well, he means … “meaning” … he—

      JC: What does that mean? (laughs)

      JR: It has to do with the fact that he sees us as experiencing the world on several levels, one of which is intellectual, and that we naturally want to understand what it is we’re experiencing. The enjoyment of art for Dewey requires some form of understanding, some sort of intellectual as well as sensual content—and that has to do with pattern. He talks about how terrifying complete chaos is. I guess he believed that was actually possible as raw experience—pure randomness, total lack of order.

      JC: Yes, I think he would be less frightened of it now. I think things change, don’t you? I mean even things of this order.

      JR: The new thinking in the complex sciences changes the way we view these things.

      JC: Yes, and I think our daily experience now. As the world becomes, as Marshall McLuhan said, smaller—it’s not much larger than the room we’re in, as he points out—then the kinds of things that go on close to you, I mean the kind of chaos that we understand (laughter) introduces us to the one we don’t understand, simply because we’re in this corner of the room … (We decide to end for the day. Tape recorder turned off.)

      FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7

      JR: I want to start today by asking you about “Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else” since it will appear in the issue [of Aerial magazine] with this interview. Would you explain the process of composition of the piece?

      JC: Yes. The piece is made with computer facility. Both in terms of chance operations and the special computer facility of being able to establish a source of material from which the chance operations can then select material and specify where the material comes from by line and character. So that it becomes easy to work in a state of multiplicity with precision, hmm? And without having to bother choosing. So that in a vast array of material, you can pinpoint something, and you can know where you are, and then work accordingly. I can imagine programs in which you would specifically not want to work with the thing that you had pinpointed, but to work with something at a distance. I’ve never done that. I’ve tended to pinpoint and then work close by the pinpoint. In the case of the Jasper Johns text, I’ve taken quotations from him which appear in a catalog that was published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In it, there was one mistake—in grammar—which Jasper Johns immediately recognized. He was misquoted in the catalog, but fortunately I had not misquoted him. I quoted the catalog correctly, but the catalog misquoted him in … what was it?—“Art is either a complaint or appeasement,” something like that. And he said it should have been “Art is either a complaint or an appeasement.” He noticed that, he noticed that difference. It couldn’t be “a complaint or a appeasement,” you see.

      JR: Are the first two pages of your piece—

      JC: Those are all quotations from this catalog.

      JR: And did you pick those by “brushing the text” or—

      JC: