MUSICAGE. John Cage

abstract. He said that representational work was too abstract. That he required realistic painting like his own. (laughter) Yes, it goes that way. It’s very impressive. And when you agree with him it’s very mind-opening. Because you do see that representational painting, is, as Jasper says, a tragedy (laughter) and that he much prefers the real thing—the real fork. And what Mondrian wanted to paint was really what he was painting, hmm?—that couldn’t be mistaken for something else.

      JR: You spoke in the seminars [accompanying the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and transcribed in I-VI] of science as a corroboration of your work.

      JC: I was thinking of this book that I haven’t read (laughter)—the “chaos” book, you know. It’s in the air. We know enough that the book exists. And we think of that as being a kind of corroboration. It makes using chance operations seem not foolish, hmm?

      JR: Yes. For me it was corroboration of an aesthetic of complex realism. Does the term “strange attractor” [from chaos theory] mean enough to you for you to have an opinion on whether the working, composing mind is in some sense a strange attractor?

      JC: Oh tell me a little bit about that.

      JR: Well, this is how I’m trying to understand it, one question with chaotic patterns is why or how they manage to have elements of both randomness and order. There’s pattern there but not predictability in the sort of system that is subject to the “butterfly effect.” So, generated by a set of nonlinear equations and a computer time-development, you might get a pattern that you can see is a bounded system, but the location of any given point within that system as it develops is unpredictable. The organizing principle in a nonlinear pattern like that has been called a strange attractor. Since the human mind is itself a complex system whose neural networks are characterized by open-ended unpredictability (the normal human brain produces irregular neural impulses, which some scientists feel is what accounts for our ability to work in an open-ended way on long-term, complex problems), I wonder whether in its organizing of experience within certain kinds of complex aesthetic procedures, the artist is allowing the mind to behave as a strange attractor.

      JC: Well, that of course leads toward habit, doesn’t it?

      JR: Well, it would lead away from habit if it were truly a strange attractor.

      JC: So this would change distinctly from one thing to another?

      JR: Yes, it would lead to constant change, though within a bounded system. Within an overall recognizable pattern there is constant change in all the details, which is why a complex system like weather, for instance, has large recurrent patterns but becomes less and less predictable as you try to pinpoint it locally.

      JC: I’m led to think of a discussion I had with Pat Colville. She teaches painting at Cooper Union. And she was down in North Carolina when I was making edible paper.²³ We got to talking in one circumstance or another about the work of Mark Tobey, which is characterized by a great deal of variety from one painting to another. So much so that he used to refer to himself as America’s Picasso. He went in so many different directions, as Picasso did. As we got to talking, we went from the white writing of Tobey which is not always pure, is very rarely pure—I had one, I think I told you, which had no representation, or no abstract character, as Mondrian might say (laughter)—to the work of Robert Ryman. He’s devoted his life to white painting. It’s very beautiful. I was unfamiliar with his work until last year when I, late this spring—maybe April—I saw a factory in Schaffhausen near Zürich where the top floor was full of a retrospective show of Robert Ryman’s work. It’s all white. His exploration of white has continued over his entire life and of course is very extensive. He puts white on a variety of different materials. So he’s had an experimental relation to white in the world of painting that exceeds that of Tobey who earlier did it, you see, but didn’t do it, so to speak, faithfully. He didn’t do only that. He did more, different kinds of things. So we were wondering, had Tobey not been so Picassoid (laughter), would he have been a better artist? Sounds silly, a proposition like that. If he hadn’t been who he was, would it have been better for us in terms of white painting? A perfectly silly thing, but as we were thinking along those stupid lines we realized that the idea came to him, so to speak, in the same way that it came to Robert Ryman—out of the air, hmm? He did—because of the time, perhaps, that it came to him, in relation to all the other things that came to him—he did it as … he did what he did. And we’re grateful. It’s a question then of forgoing the thought that it would have been better for us had he done more than he did.

      JR: So, interestingly, that came to your mind after my talking about the mind as a strange attractor … and weather systems …

      JC: And I really couldn’t tell whether the strange attractor was subjective or was “in the air.” And I don’t know whether you mean it to be one place or the other.

      JR: Well that’s an interesting question.

      JC: Yes, we don’t really know where it is, do we? Because the mind in Buddhist terms is part of the air, so to speak. Which is Mind with a big M, hmm? So the little—this mind and that mind—are Mind, and there’s a communion, hmm? In other words, there can be a flow. In fact there must be one, otherwise we can’t explain the fact that several people invent the same thing at the same time independently—or that these two artists deal with white—satisfactorily—over a shorter or a longer period of time, earlier or later.

      JR: So in a way that would be like those two minds having similar local weather within a larger pattern. That’s interesting, because I was—I think you picked up on it—I was thinking more in terms of the mind creating the weather patterns rather than being subject to them.

      JC: It could go in one direction or the other.

      JR: In this respect I’m thinking about Jackson Mac Low, and connections between your work, along with the earlier question of time. Jackson talks about five temporal arts—music, dance, poetry, film, and video.

      JC: That’s very good.

      JR: That interested me because, though I think of poetry as involving time more than any other form of writing, I have been approaching it lately graphically too—as a spatial art.

      JC: With Apollinaire it could go in the other direction. It can be in both. But this is close to Indian thinking. I forget what they call it, but there’s a term for the temporal arts. Of course they weren’t thinking about video. But they certainly thought of music and dancing—those are the two that make it real, don’t you think? And poetry.

      JR: Yes, and this complex realism seems so far from the contemporary fascination with various forms of irony. (pause) Has irony as a vehicle of change, in the Kierkegaardian sense—as a mode that can move us from aesthetic to ethical to religious perspectives—has that played any part in your thinking or your work? (Pause.)