Andy Weaver

Department of English
University of Alberta
aweaver@ualberta.ca

 

Review of: David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art.Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001.

 

Agree or disagree with his aesthetics, his ideas, or his politics, no one seriously engaged in studying the arts of the twentieth century can afford to ignore John Cage or his wide-ranging body of work. His influence on experimental forms of music is well documented, but his achievements and influence in the fields of literature, visual arts, and film are also significant and worthy of more discussion. Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, is an attempt, as Bernstein states in his introduction, to “give readers a sense of the importance of Cage’s creative activities in a variety of fields and an understanding of how much research has yet to be done” (6). It is both the book’s greatest achievement and most significant failure that it accomplishes both of these aims.

 

The book is an extension of the “Here Comes Everybody: The Music, Poetry, and Art of John Cage” conference, which took place at Mills College in Oakland, California in the autumn of 1995, and so “was the first international assemblage of scholars and creative artists to examine Cage’s work after his death on August 12, 1992” (1); indeed, the idea for the conference developed less than a year after Cage’s death (ix). This link between Cage’s death and the conference is carried over in the essays included in Writings, as almost all of the authors implicitly focus on the absence of John Cage, the man, either through intricately describing his working practices, relating personal anecdotes about Cage, describing what Cage meant to them and their work, or, sometimes, by mixing all three of these perspectives. For this reason, the book becomes a celebration of John Cage’s life and his art. Perhaps due to the short time that passed between Cage’s death and the germination of this project, the book is, for the most part, more of a wake for a great man than a critical examination of Cage’s works.

 

This is not to say that there isn’t useful information in the book; each essay offers interesting facts about Cage’s creative process, the performance of his work, and the scoring of his work. The problem is that there is often a lack of critical examination of many of these facts. The result is that the essays in the book could be divided into two distinct types: those offering ideological critiques of Cage’s work and those documenting Cage’s formal procedures. The former engage intellectually with Cage’s aesthetics, his beliefs, and his politics and seek to open up ways to engage Cage’s work critically; they offer important insights into how Cage’s personal beliefs, such as his devotion to Zen, chance, and political and social anarchy, both affected his work and offer insights into the works themselves. The second type of essays, those documenting Cage’s creative process, generally avoids issues of ideology in an attempt to describe objectively how Cage created his works. These essays, it seems to me, are less valuable, precisely because they refuse to deal with the issues that Cage found so important in life and art; they focus on Cage, not on his works, and so they fail to open up avenues of investigation into Cage’s music, visual art, or literary texts.

 

The book starts quite strongly. The first essay, by David W. Bernstein, examines Cage’s music in relation to the large umbrella terms “avant-garde,” “modernism,” and “postmodernism.” Bernstein offers a nuanced investigation of Cage’s art and his politics in order to highlight both the experimental as well as the traditional aspects of Cage’s music. Bernstein argues against the unexamined conflation of experimentation with postmodernism and tradition with modernism, instead showing how Cage exemplified aspects of both those terms. By drawing on the influence that the early avant-garde, especially dadaism but also futurism, had on Cage, Bernstein argues persuasively that Cage’s chance-based musical works do indeed have a distinct political agenda:

 

when considering Cage's compositional methods, one finds that the postmodern and the modern coexist without contradiction. The same is true of Cage's political and social agenda. Through his redefinition of musical form Cage created works modeling desirable political and social structures. He was able to renew the modernist project dedicated to political and social change through art using postmodernist artistic techniques. As we assess Cage's role within the development of twentieth-century thought and musical style and intensify the critical evaluation of his creative output, it is crucial that we consider both the traditional and the radical aspects of his aesthetics and compositional style. This formidable task may very well occupy scholars for many years to come. (40)

 

The essay refuses to categorize Cage within the unproductive binaries that Cage himself constantly railed against; the result is an appreciation of the complex balancing job Cage performed as a political artist who avoided politics in his art and as a man who respected earlier traditions at the same time that he worked to dismantle their influences. Bernstein addresses the interplay between Cage’s political anarchy and his use of chance operations, and, more importantly, he historicizes Cage within a continuum. Cage, Bernstein argues, openly borrowed from earlier avant-garde movements while he also updated their methods; he remained committed to the modernist avant-garde’s belief in social improvement through art, but refocused artistic practice around an anarchistic refusal to engage in oppositional politics.

 

Jonathan D. Katz, in the essay that follows Bernstein’s, expands on Cage’s political beliefs and strategies while refocusing the area of investigation onto and through Cage’s closeted homosexuality. Katz proposes that Cage’s silence over his own sexuality strengthened his interest both in the use of silence in music and in Eastern philosophies such as Zen, which stress the positive aspects of silence. Biographical criticism is a dangerous method to use when dealing with an artist like Cage, who attempted to remove as much of his personality from his work as he could, but Katz offers a convincing argument as to why he believes this approach is appropriate: “there is a substantial difference between saying that the work is not about the life (antiexpressionism) and saying that the life has nothing to do with the work. There are, after all, modes of revelation of self that have nothing to do with expressionism” (47). Here Katz distinguishes between conventional biographical criticism, which uses the artist’s life to explain the meaning of a work of art, and a criticism that acknowledges the importance of biography to the interests and predispositions from which an artist will draw when producing art. Katz deftly uses Cage’s homosexuality, or more specifically his refusal to acknowledge his homosexuality, as the primary reason for Cage’s use of silence in his works. From this starting point, Cage became increasingly interested in Zen’s belief that silence was necessary to inner harmony, since “Zen repositioned the closet, not as a source of repression or anxiety, but as a means to achieve healing; it was in not talking about–and hence not reifying–one’s troubles that healing began” (45). Katz also points out the revolutionary nature of Cage’s use of silence, considering that the use of silence was developed during the height of public popularity for abstract expressionism, an art movement that concentrated on creating grand Romantic myths about artists such as Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. But perhaps most importantly, Katz draws a parallel between Cage’s silence and his political beliefs. Like Bernstein, Katz argues that Cage’s art was implicitly political; for Katz, silence provided Cage with a way to critique society’s values without engaging in oppositional politics, something that Cage believed only perpetuated what was supposedly being argued against:

 

silence was much more than conventionally unmusical; it provided a route toward an active challenge of the assumptions and prejudices that gave rise to homophobic oppression in the first place. For Cage, silence was an ideal form of resistance, carefully attuned to the requirements of the cold war consensus, at least in its originary social-historical context. There are both surrender and resistance in these silences, in relation not of either/or but of both/and[...]. That Cage's self-silencing was in keeping with the requirements of the infamously homophobic McCarthy era should not obscure the fact that it was also internally and ideologically consistent with his larger aesthetic politics. (53-4)

 

While Katz’s essay does not deal with all of the political aspects of Cage’s work (for example, an analysis of Cage’s commitment to political anarchism would have been interesting in this context), Katz effectively brings to the forefront the often-overlooked political aspects of Cage’s work.

 

Austin Clarkson’s essay, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal,” offers interesting insights into how Cage’s music was presentational, not representational. Presentational arts, Clarkson argues, create their own codes of meaning as they are expressed, while representational arts rely on a prior understanding of the codes by both the artist and the recipients. For this reason, Clarkson argues that Cage was not avant-garde; the avant-gardists still believed their art to be representational, since they “took their works to be fully realized creations and not experiments in the sense of trials or tests” (66). Clarkson’s emphasis on the creative role of the audience in the presentational arts, a belief that Cage held, is an important point, and it might allow Clarkson to draw connections between Cage’s music and other contemporary fields that share this belief, such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Epoetry (or even Cage’s own poetry). However, Clarkson does not draw these connections and remains somewhat narrowly focused on the world of music. Moreover, Clarkson’s assertion that Cage was purely an experimental artist and not an avant-gardist reinforces the strict and rather unhelpful divisions between aesthetic camps, divisions that all of Cage’s mature work attempted to undercut. Unlike Bernstein and Katz, who work to show how these boundaries are far more fluid than critics would admit, Clarkson mans the barricades. For example, Clarkson does not address the fact that the conflation between art and life that he states lies at the heart of presentational art also forms the core of the historical avant-garde movements.¹ Moreover, he also overlooks the connection between Cage’s political and social anarchy and his desire to make the audience part of the creative element of the work. Still, despite these drawbacks, Clarkson’s focus on the creative relationship called for by presentational art is an important point, especially since he stresses that both the audience and the artist must learn to adapt to these new roles.

 

Bernstein’s, Katz’s, and Clarkson’s essays are particularly illuminating because they demonstrate that an awareness of Cage’s aesthetic and political beliefs adds to the levels of possible meaning in all of Cage’s post-1950 work. These writers focus on explaining and expanding possible nuances in the works through a knowledge of Cage’s personal beliefs. However, most of the remaining essays abandon this practice of theorizing levels of meaning in Cage’s oeuvre in favor of merely describing Cage’s compositional processes. The result is that, while useful facts are offered, there are very few moments of true critical insight into Cage’s aesthetics or his works in the bulk of the book.

 

In the essay “Cage as Performer,” Gordon Mumma offers an interesting but standard brief biography of Cage as a performer. Deborah Campana, in “As Time Passes,” discusses how time remained central to Cage’s compositional strategies throughout his different musical periods, but she offers no ideas about why this was so or what light it might shed on his work. In “David Tudor and the Solo for Piano,” John Holzapfel discusses Tudor’s active role in interpreting Cage’s music, stressing the collaborative nature of their relationship but offers no thoughts on how this affects Cage’s music. Jackson Mac Low offers a necessarily brief and admittedly limited discussion of Cage’s writings in “Cage’s Writings up to the Late 1980s.” Mac Low argues that Cage never sought to expunge personal decisions from his writings, but the broad overview that Mac Low offers doesn’t allow for in-depth analysis.

 

The collection also includes the transcripts from two panel discussions at the “Here Comes Everybody” conference. The panel on “Cage’s Influence” was composed of Gordon Mumma (chair), Allan Kaprow, James Tenney, Christian Wolff, Alvin Curram, and Maryanne Amasher. More so than most of the pieces included, this discussion is openly laudatory of Cage; it offers few insights and serves more as a chance for those involved to thank Cage publicly for opening avenues of investigation that allowed them to form their careers. In fact, they all agree that Cage’s influence was more indirect, through his role as a trailblazer, than direct. The second panel discussion, “Cage and the Computer,” offers more insight, but in terms of detailing Cage’s compositional practices rather than advancing any theoretical insights into the importance of the computer to Cage. Composed of James Pritchett (chair), James Tenney, Frances White, and Andrew Culver (Cage’s long-serving computer assistant), the panel describes how early work with computers developed, but mostly this piece is interesting for Culver’s anecdotes about how Cage worked with the computer: he didn’t. Culver did all of the computer work himself, finding out what Cage wanted and then making it happen.

 

Henning Lohner’s discussion of “The Making of Cage’s One” closes the book. It is an interesting blend of interview, personal anecdote, documentation, and critical discussion on the topic of Lohner’s collaboration with Cage on the experimental film One (Cage’s last major work). The piece serves as a biography of the collaboration, an elegy (Cage died after the film was completed but before it was premiered), and as a witness to Cage’s compositional strategies. Moreover, it is a fractured piece of writing, paratactically juxtaposing interviews with Cage, documentation surrounding the film, anecdotes of working with Cage, and thoughts on the medium of film. As such, it is the only non-linear piece of writing in the book (Clarkson does attempt something different in his essay, where he includes a series of quotes from Cage after his essay, but that essay is straightforward in terms of structure). This point leads me to one of the major drawbacks of this collection: there is too much similarity and consensus among the writers and essays included.

 

Considering the short time-span between Cage’s death and the germination of the conference from which this book sprang, it is hardly surprising that the essayists came together to praise Cage, not to bury him. However, considering Cage’s incessant search for experimentation in all of his artistic endeavors, it seems a poor tribute to him to ignore the practices and aesthetics that he worked so hard to establish. Cage, for example, was a noted anarchist (a fact rarely addressed or even acknowledged in most of the essays); part of his desire to do away with the conventional structures of music, language, and the visual arts sprang directly from his belief that these structures upheld conventional opinions about society, opinions that Cage certainly did not share. For example, Cage often stated his preference for “nonsyntaxed” language: “Due to N. O. Brown’s remark that syntax is the arrangement of the army, and Thoreau’s that when he heard a sentence he heard feet marching, I became devoted to nonsytactical ‘demilitarized’ language” (Introduction). The connection between doing away with the accepted codes of language and critiquing the status quo is obvious in Cage’s statement; for the authors in the book to undertake such standard investigations of Cage and his work is to turn away from his implicit critiques of logical communication and stifle these critiques under the weight of convention. Moreover, Cage constantly and often proudly contradicted himself; this was not merely an attempt to be difficult or inscrutable (both ideas were tied in Cage’s mind with the Romantic myth of the artist, and were to be avoided at all cost).² Cage’s contradictions came from his distrust of consensus (a point which only Bernstein and Katz make), a distrust that arose partly from his belief in anarchy (which holds that reifications of any type, even personal characteristics, should be avoided in favor of openness to circumstances), and partly from his interest in Zen (which states that logic is not the only way, or indeed the best way to understand the world). It would be a far greater tribute to Cage and his work if his critics here openly debated the ideas, importance, and merit of Cage’s work. As he so often stated, Cage was not interested in creating art, which in his mind was dead and reified; however, the consistently laudatory tone of the essays implicitly moves Cage’s works toward that category, toward installing him as another Great Artist within the canon.³

 

Perhaps the greatest drawback to the collection, though, can be illustrated in relation to the two essays not yet discusssed: Constance Lewallen’s “Cage and the Structure of Chance” and Ray Kass’s “Diary: Cage’s Mountain Lake Workshop, April 8-15, 1990.” Coincidentally, both of these essays address Cage’s visual works; this, however, isn’t the problem. Both Lewallen and Kass attempt to detail Cage’s creative process, and it is this attempt that leads to the problem: both essays focus on Cage, the man as artist, and, as such, both essays undercut Cage’s attempt to divorce his own ego from his work. Indeed, neither Lewallen nor Kass deal critically with Cage’s works at all. Instead, they focus on Cage’s creative process in minute detail, cataloging his every decision. The result is that, although Cage does appear to be rather idiosyncratic, he is once again reshaped in the critics’ minds as a Great Artist. For example, note the laudatory tone and the emphasis on Cage the Artist (not on the works that Cage happened to produce) in the following:

 

Cage managed to challenge just about all of Western culture's received ideas about what art is. If, from the Renaissance on, art has been regarded as a means of communication, Cage instead defined art as self-alteration, a means to "sober the mind." If art has served to give form to the chaos of life's experiences, he created an art that as nearly as possible combines with, rather than gives shape to, life. If art has been regarded as a giver of truths through the "self-expressed individuality of artist," Cage saw it rather as an exploration of how nature itself functions as a means to open the mind and spirit to the beauty of life with a minimum of artistic expression or interpenetration. Finally, if art has traditionally expressed meaning through symbol or metaphor, he preferred that viewers provide their own meaning according to their individual personality and experience. (Lewallen 242-3)

 

One can’t help but feel that no matter what “art has been regarded as,” for Lewallen, Cage would have heroically challenged it. I don’t mean to downplay Cage’s sense of experimentation, but the Romantic myth of the artist is strikingly apparent in both Lewallen’s and Kass’s pieces (and runs implicitly through most of the other essays). Lewallen refuses to contextualize Cage, and thus there is no sense of how Cage learned from others (Suzuki, Fuller, Thoreau, Kropotkin, etc.) the challenges that he put into place. This decontextualization fuels the transformation of Cage from experimenter in the arts into one of the reified, understandable Artists of the Canon by writing the narrative of Cage’s life and artistic achievements within the frame of the grand, solitary, creative genius. Not only does this transformation violate Cage’s beliefs, but it also serves to tame his challenges, which become recuperated within the framework of Art (Peter Bürger and Paul Mann, for example, both describe how the art world recuperated the challenges against the institution of art made by the avant-garde movements by first claiming these challenges as art). Furthermore, Cage’s works are themselves overlooked in an attempt to install him firmly within the tradition of artistic revolution, a type of artistic anti-tradition that in every way deeply depends on what it supposedly is trying to undermine.

 

In the end, what a book like Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art does is to display the conservatism of most criticism of experimental art. Despite the constant challenges offered by artists in all of the different media–challenges which Cage in many ways helped to nurture and perpetuate–critics refuse to adapt either the form or the content of their discussions. As such, the critics play a front-line role in recuperating experimental art and artists such as John Cage. Having said that, I’m not entirely sure how to avoid playing this role; however, we might learn from the example of the experimental artists themselves and break down the conventions of academic criticism. If Cage taught us nothing else, it is that there are ways outside of conventional logic to understand the world and all things in it; perhaps, then, it is time for critics at least to gesture toward the idea that conventional logic is not necessarily the most appropriate nor the only way to engage with experimental art.

 

Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art could serve as a useful introduction to John Cage’s work, especially in the field of music. It contains many useful facts about his working process; however, this raw data is not examined effectively by the essayists included in this book. Aside from the first three essays and a few of the later ones, there is little here that will significantly expand the way readers might encounter John Cage’s works. What the book points to is the divide in Cage studies between those critics offering ideological critiques of his works, critiques which actively engage with the ideas and beliefs that Cage brought to his works, and those who focus on Cage himself. In the end, Writings shows that the focus must shift from the latter to the former if studies of Cage are going to increase the critical appreciation of John Cage’s music, poetry, and art.

 

Notes

 

1. Peter Bürger, for example, sees the conflation of art and life as one of the fundamental tenets of the early avant-garde. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, he states that “the European avant-garde movements can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society. What is negated is not an earlier form of art (a style) but art as an institution that is unassociated with the life praxis of men” (49).

 

2. Take, for example, this exchange between Richard Kostelanetz and Cage in Kostelanetz’s Conversing With Cage:

 

[Kostelanetz] Once someone asked you a very dull question, trying to show that you had been inconsistent in a line of reasoning, and I remember that with that marvelous laugh of yours you said, 'Well, you won't find me consistent.' [Cage] Emerson felt this way about consistency, you know; but our education leads us to think that it's wrong to be inconsistent. All consistency is, really, is getting one idea and not deviating from it, even if the circumstances change so radically that one ought to deviate [...]. (45)

 

3. Cage made it clear that he did not want to create art, which, like the dadaists, he saw as cut-off from life:

 

I RATHER THINK THAT CONTEMPORARY MUSIC WOULD BE THERE IN THE DARK TOO, BUMPING INTO THINGS, KNOCKING OTHERS OVER AND IN GENERAL ADDING TO THE DISORDER THAT CHARACTERIZES LIFE (IF IT IS OPPOSED TO ART) RATHER THAN ADDING TO THE ORDER AND STABILIZED TRUTH BEAUTY AND POWER THAT CHARACTERIZE A MASTERPIECE (IF IT IS OPPOSED TO LIFE). AND IS IT? YES IT IS. (Silence 46)

 

Works Cited:

 

• Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.
• Cage, John. Introduction. Writing Through Finnegans Wake. Spec. supplement to James Joyce Quarterly. Vol. 15, U of Tulsa Monograph Ser. 16. N.p.: n.p., 1978.
• —. Silence. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1973.
• Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing With Cage. New York: Limelight, 1988.