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WD_329/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0329 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact try as we may to make a silence, we cannot’1 - John Cage.
John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg: The Art of Noisy Silence.
Paul Knipe
In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg exhibited his series of monochromes called the ‘White Paintings’ at the Stable Gallery. The works were made during the summer of 1951, and were simply ‘ordinary house paint uniformly applied to canvas surfaces with a roller’.2 There were five paintings: a single square canvas; two vertical panels; three vertical panels; four square panels arranged to form a larger square; and seven vertical panels arranged in a horizontal line.3 They were purely white, with the edges of the panels forming the only visible lines.
In 1952, David Tudor performed John Cage’s composition ‘4’33”’, for the first time at Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York.4 The piece was made up of three movements, indicated by Tudor through the opening and closing of the piano lid. Apart from those actions and the turning of the score, Tudor didn’t touch the keys at all. In 1961, Cage stated: ‘To whom it may concern: The White Paintings came first; my silent piece came later’.5
This essay intends to explore the notion of ‘silence’, through the work of Rauschenberg and Cage, and to contextualise it within the broader socio-political framework of the time. The essay will mostly concentrate on Rauschenberg’s ‘White Paintings’ and Cage’s composition ‘4’33”’, and the mutual influence and relationship between them. Finally however, other works will be considered to show their position at the forefront of the new Post-modern avant-garde.
‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time…
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter…'6 - John Keats.
QUESTIONING SILENCE. Firstly it is imperative to discuss what silence actually is, and how the term is used to describe visual as well as aural works of art. Silence is quite a difficult concept, because if we are to believe John Cage, then it does not exist. Previously to reading John Cage however, silence- aural silence that is- stood for all the times when there was not any sound or noise. It was the break in Beethoven’s 9th before the choral Ode to Joy.
There is a very well known story amongst John Cage fanatics that relates to his experience in an anechoic chamber- a soundproof room. Cage states: ‘I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high one low…the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood circulation’, concluding, ‘until I die there will be sounds.’7 This experience was for Cage the beginning of a lifelong experiment with silence, to prove that there is actually no such thing, with his work ‘4’33”’ being part of this. While the performance was going on, or as such not going on, the audience became aware of things around them, attention was brought to other noise, amplified in the silence. Roni Feinstein remarked that ‘the content of the piece consisted in all the sounds and actions present in the immediate environment during the duration of the performance’, including rainfall, trucks, coughing and chairs scraping on the floor. She concluded that ‘the art situation was used to draw the spectator’s attention to the environment and themselves’.8
John Cage is famous for these radical gestures, and also for his influences- a mix of oriental philosophy such as Zen Buddhism and the ‘I Ching’ or Chinese Book of Changes,9 and the European philosophers Carl Jung 10 and Henri Bergson. Yet perhaps not so well known is his regard for Dada, particularly Marcel Duchamp.11 All these influences fuelled his notions of chance, spontaneity, and change, combining these with his love for nature, all of which are fundamental to his stance. These ideas and his influences will be returned to later in the essay.
ON FORMING A VISUAL SILENCE. So, we have discussed the notion of aural silence, but how can silence relate to anything visual, such as a painting? In a letter to Betty Parsons, just after he had completed his ‘White Paintings’, Rauschenberg commented on his works and how they were ‘dealing with the suspense, excitement, and body of an organic silence, the restriction and freedom of absence, the plastic fullness of nothing, the point a circle begins and ends’.12 In so doing, Rauschenberg was associating his work to an aural silence- its purity and monochromatic nature would seem to be the closest analogy of a visual silence. As such it seems logical to associate total abstraction in art to nothingness, and thus silence. This was not wholly new, but similarly to Cage’s music represented the furthest point yet in the history of art, toward total abstraction.
In her essay ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Susan Sontag elaborates this point stating:
‘Most valuable art in our time has been experienced by audiences as a move into silence…Committed to the idea that the power of art is located in its power to negate, the ultimate weapon in the artist’s inconsistent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer to silence’.13
This ‘war’ that Sontag outlines concerns the radical work of the early 20th century in particular, that of the abstractions of Mondrian and Kandinsky, Dada, the Constructivists and the Suprematist Malevich, for example. How far can the avant-garde push the boundaries, relating to a work’s receptivity by the audience, to ensure that they remain separate and elite? 14
Sontag agrees with Cage on the nature of silence, stating that ‘silence doesn’t exist in a literal sense, however, as the experience of an audience. It would mean that the spectator was aware of no stimulus or that he was unable to make a response’. She continues by maintaining that ‘as a property of the work of art itself, silence can exist only in a cooked or non-literal sense’.15
A TWO WAY INSPIRATION: THE 'WHITE PAINTINGS' AND '4"33'. Although Cage went to lengths to point out that the ‘White Paintings’ were made before ‘4’33”’, it is important to explore this further, as it was in fact a two way influence at the beginning of a long friendship between them. This is summed up by Cage in an interview with Calvin Tomkins early in the 1960’s, when he said ‘there was from the beginning a sense of absolute identification or utter agreement. So Much so that I can’t tell whether his ideas or mine are his’.16 Indeed, although Cage was 13 years the senior of Rauschenberg, Feinstein points out that the relationship between the two artists was ‘not one of master and pupil but of close friendship and mutual admiration’.17 It was the nature of the ‘White Paintings’ that inspired Cage to compose ‘4’33”’, stating that they had given him the ‘courage’ to compose a piece of such radicality.18 Cage even later altered the score so that it would appear more like the vertical panels of the ‘White Paintings’.19 However, the paintings were also seen as a ‘response to Cage’s artistic philosophy’, as the ‘friendship reinforced certain tendencies’ already in evidence in Rauschenberg’s work.20
An important event early in the friendship, proving how mutual the understanding and influence between them was, happened in 1952, when both Cage and Rauschenberg were at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Several performers including Rauschenberg and the avant-garde dancer Merce Cunningham combined under the direction of Cage to produce ‘Theatre Event #1’. David Hopkins has commented that it was the appreciation from the likes of Cunningham and Rauschenberg ‘of Cage’s Dada derived ideas’, that led to a ‘spontaneous interdisciplinary ‘happening’’.21
The performance was based on chance, with the artists doing whatever they liked during its duration: ‘Rauschenberg played old scratchy records on a gramophone, and projected movies and slides onto walls’,22 whilst ‘Cunningham danced in and around the audience’.23 However, most importantly was the hanging of the ‘White Paintings’ from overhead rafters. Not only is this significant because it revealed just how important Cage believed them to be, but it also ‘asserted the paintings as objects, as literal presences that inhabit real space and enhance the viewers awareness of the environment in which he and the paintings coexist’. This of course seems similar to the interaction between audience and work in ‘4’33”’, and also in the essay by Susan Sontag.
Just how significant Cage believed the ‘White Paintings’ to be, proving the inspiration to his silent piece, can be seen through his own article in 1961, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and His Work’ (the italics that Cage puts in are quotes from Rauschenberg):24
‘The White Paintings were airports for the lights, shadows, and particles…a painting constantly changing…Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two)…I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I am doing…Into this, structure and all, anything goes. The structure was not the point. But it was practical: you could actually see that everything was happening without anything’s being done. Before such emptiness, you just wait to see what you will see…(The White Paintings caught whatever fell on them; why did I not look at them with my magnifying glass? Only because I didn’t yet have one? Do you agree with the statement: After all, nature is better than art?)’25
This statement throws up a number of issues: the objectivity or material aspect of the paintings; the individual receptivity of the audience; the relationship Cage placed between art and nature, and thus the influences to Cage’s artistic philosophy and subsequent reinforcing of certain tendencies for Rauschenberg. Although a lot of this is relevant to part two of this essay, certain aspects need to be introduced here.
David Jeffreys states that ‘the exclusive use of the ‘colour’ white in a painting is arguably the most radical form of abstraction and has almost universally provoked ideas of negation and of the spiritual’.26 We have already noted the analogy between monochrome white and visual silence, but it is necessary to delve deeper into the reasons for this and the objectivity of such a work. In the letter to Betty Parsons, Rauschenberg commented on the paintings as ‘almost an emergency’, continuing that his works were ‘not Art because they take you to a place in painting art has not been’,27 and in 1953 he elaborated this further maintaining that they ‘are either too full or too empty to be thought- thereby they remain visual experiences. These pictures are not art’.28 What did Rauschenberg mean by this, and how is it relevant to silence and materiality?
Jeffreys has suggested that this may be partly confusion within Rauschenberg himself at this point, an uncertainty about his art, particularly amid the dominant introspection and metaphysical nature of Abstract Expressionism.29 As such it relates to the materiality of the ‘White Paintings’, and is helped by the notion of silence. Aspects within the dominant movement of the time, such as religion and the sublime, begin to loosen with Rauschenberg’s monochromes, seen through his statement regarding ‘visual experiences’. Jeffreys elaborates: ‘the use of the phrase ‘visual experiences’ reveals the kind of empirical role…which in later accounts Rauschenberg sees that pictures as playing; not guiding as previously, but passively facilitating sensations in the body of the viewer’.30 Jeffreys continues by mentioning blankness, associated with the monochrome white: ‘indeed, it would appear that in later statements Rauschenberg is relating to precisely this sense of blankness. This ties in with the ideas of John Cage with whom he became a friend and collaborator, but crucially not until after Rauschenberg began work on the White Paintings’.31 Here, it could be said that the uncertainties that Rauschenberg had about the work and how it was art, while still mixed up in a lingering Modernist phase, were cleared up through the ideas and work of Cage.
There is also a new sense of freedom in the work, a freedom that is synonymous with silence. Obviously, the white monochrome is fundamental to this, but also, Jeffreys maintains, is the repetition of identical units, stating: ‘free from the need to engage directly with the process of painting; free to mark time numbers, human scale, and ‘today’ by producing identical replicable modules which could be repeated apparently indefinitely’. To reiterate Rauschenberg, ‘they take you to a place in painting where art hasn’t been before’.32
Later, in 1963, Rauschenberg developed this even further, to a position which seems even closer to that of Cage, commenting that his ‘White Paintings’ were not passive, but ‘hypersensitive, so that any situation they were in, one could almost look at the painting and see how many people were in the room or what time of day it was’.33 This proves many similarities between these works and ‘4’33”’, regarding the awareness of everyday, menial life around when confronted with art, enhancing nature, responding simultaneously to Rauschenberg’s position in the gap between art and life, and to Cage’s question concerned with the importance of nature in relation to art.
In one further development of the objectivity of the ‘White Paintings’, and its relation to the receptivity of the audience, Sontag stated that ‘as the artist can’t embrace silence literally and remain an artist, what the rhetoric of silence indicates is a determination to pursue his activity more deviously than before. One way is indicated by Breton’s notion of the ‘full margin’. The artist is enjoined to devote himself to filling up the periphery of the art space, leaving the central usage blank’.34 In his ‘White Paintings’, where the edges of the canvases acted as margins, Rauschenberg shifted this aspect to its limits. As Jeffreys elaborates:
‘The complexity of thought which derives from works of such apparent simplicity occurs because the attention has shifted from the paintings surface, to the edges, and thus to the paintings as objects. In later accounts…the attention shifts even further away from the works themselves which merely act as reminders of the activity in the room’.35
THE SILENT INFLUENCE TO JOHN CAGE. The importance that Cage places on silence becomes clearer if one were to look in more depth at his influences. The radical and provocative nature of Cage’s lectures and meetings often provoked cries of ‘Dada’,36 and David Hopkins has gone so far as to attribute Cage as being ‘the prime mover in disseminating Duchamp’s ideas in America’.37 The Dadaists were concerned with the notion of ‘anti-art’, radically attacking the boundaries of art, both subjectively and objectively, and Duchamp, through his use of ‘Ready-mades’ and satire attempted to ‘abolish watertight distinctions between art and life’.38
The notion of art and life and their distinctions, as we have seen, were important for Cage, and through him Rauschenberg. To take this particular influence further, Brandon W. Joseph has commented on the subject, relating Cage’s observation about the ‘White Paintings’, being ‘airports for the lights, shadows and particles’, to Duchamp’s painting ‘Tu m’’ (1918), ‘a painting that includes representations of shadows of Duchamp’s readymade bicycle wheel, his hat rack, and a corkscrew’. It also provokes analogies to Man Ray’s close up photograph of Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ entitled ‘Dust Breeding’, where the caption at the bottom reads in part, ‘view taken from an airplane by Man Ray’.39
The composition of the ‘Large Glass’ was very influential to Cage. Being made of glass, with large areas devoid of any line or figuration, it can be seen as containing visual silences. Cage said of the work:
‘Looking at the ‘Large Glass’, the thing I like so much is that I can focus my attention wherever I wish- it helps me to blur the distinction between art and life and produces a kind of silence in the work itself. There is nothing in it that requires me to look in one place or another or, in fact, requires me to look at all. I can look through it to the world beyond’.40
It was this aspect of the ‘transparent’ nature of the ‘Large Glass’ that so fascinated Cage. The transparency of glass has obvious parallels to silence, with the aspect of ‘seeing through’ an object similar to the ability of art to provoke awareness of the immediate environment. Indeed, as Cage stated in 1952, ‘one can hear through a piece of music just as one can see through some modern buildings…or the glass of Marcel Duchamp’.41
Along with outlining Duchamp’s influence to Cage, Joseph also describes in some detail the importance of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. We know that Cage was familiar with his work through the description of the nature of experimental music: ‘It goes without saying that dissonances and noises are welcome in this new music…for this new music is not concerned with harmoniousness…here we are concerned with the coexistence of dissimilars…This disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson’s statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which we are unaccustomed’.42 But what exactly was this theory? Joseph believes Cage’s statement about disharmony to have derived from Bergson’s chapter ‘The Idea of Nothing’ in ‘Creative Evolution’.
In a scene which seems similar to Cage’s experience in the anechoic chamber, Bergson stated ‘I am going to close my eyes, stop my ears, extinguish one by one the sensations that come to me from the outer world…Now it is done; all my perceptions vanish, the material universe sinks into silence and night’.43 Bergson sought to prove, so Joseph maintained, that nothingness was ‘devoid of ontological status: that it was merely a ‘pseudo-idea’ resulting from confusion within the subject’.44 What was perceived as the absence of an object or, to use Sontag’s term, the negation of an idea, actually corresponded only to the finding of one thing while looking for something else.
Joseph rightly comments that Cage had ‘imported Bergson’s critique of negation from philosophy into music, applying it to sound specifically rather than being in general. The conclusion, however, was the same’.45 Joseph continues by suggesting a substitution of the term ‘sound’ for that of ‘reality’, with fascinating results, providing ‘Cage’s mature understanding of silence exactly’:
[Bergson:] ‘Now the unreality which is here in question is purely relative to the direction in which our attention is engaged, for we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought-for reality wherever we find the presence of another. We thus express what we have as a function of what we want.46
Reflecting on this, Joseph stated, ‘it is Bergson’s critique of negation, expressed in his contention that ‘there is no absolute void in nature’, that ultimately underlies Cage’s statement that ‘there is no such thing as silence’, as well as Rauschenberg’s later pronouncement that ‘a canvas is never empty’’.47
It was also Bergson’s philosophy that helped Cage to formulate his regard for nature. Joseph states: ‘It was in Bergson’s ‘Creative Evolution’ that Cage (and through him Rauschenberg) would find the ideas of nature and temporality or, more properly, duration most intrinsically intertwined’.48 Bergson saw nature in terms of continual change and perpetual becoming, through the incessant, unidirectional flow of time.49 Joseph notes the influence Bergson had on Rauschenberg, through Cage, particularly regarding temporality: ‘Every minute’, said Rauschenberg, ‘everything is different, everywhere, it’s all flowing’.50
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, JOHN CAGE AND THE SILENT MOVE TO POSTMODERNISM. Clement Greenberg defined the essence of Modernist painting as lying ‘in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself’. He elaborated this, stating ‘Modernism criticizes from the inside…the task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered pure.’ For Greenberg, this involved embracing the aspects of a particular art that were unique to it, and for painting this was the limitations of the canvas: ‘For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art’.51
Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement of the post war period, was the epitome of this definition. Their paintings were ‘real objects, with real edges and real flatness’.52 Harold Rosenberg suggested that ‘the gesture on the canvas was a ‘gesture of liberation, from value- political, esthetic and moral’, a reaction against the psychological and cultural situation after World War II.53 Figures such as Barnett Newman experimented with the Kantian idea of the sublime, while other ‘colour-field’ Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, used painting as a ‘pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self’.54
How was this all relevant to Rauschenberg and Cage? More specifically, how and why did they reject these dominant Modernist concerns? Rauschenberg was undoubtedly influenced by the ‘colour-field’ painters, particularly Barnett Newman, and his ‘White Paintings’ at first appear to significantly reflect the ideals set out in 1960 by Greenberg. Indeed, Roni Feinstein has stated that the paintings can be seen as partly a ‘direct and immediate response to Barnett Newman’s exhibition at Betty Parsons’ gallery…in 1951’.55 Also, although not sublime,56 Rauschenberg was at the time concerned with religious subjects, with the original letter to Betty Parsons speaking of God and the innocence of the Virgin.57
Cage, on the other hand, coming from a musical and philosophical background, was not interested in the ideas that resulted in the great Abstract Expressionist works. Feinstein has suggested that he:
‘Rejected the expression of feelings in art, calling instead for an impersonal aesthetic, one from which personal tastes, desires, and emotions would be eliminated. He believed that art should have the source in the everyday world, in the facts of the physical environment as they are perceived to by the senses…through multiplicity, simultaneity, and co-existence of things in the world, independent of causation…the purpose of art was to heighten people’s sensory awareness, to help them see, hear, and experience the world around them’.58
This, as has been suggested was to be most thoroughly achieved with silence. As has also been suggested, it was the influence of Cage, amongst other things that helped Rauschenberg to clarify tendencies that he was uncertain about.
These tendencies appear in other work by Rauschenberg at the time. For example, contemporary to the ‘White Paintings’ were his ‘Black Paintings’, monochromatic also, but painted on newspaper, thus loosening Greenberg’s words about ‘flatness’ and purity. Rauschenberg later said of the works: ‘I was interested in complexity without their revealing much. The fact that there was a lot to see but not much showing’.59 Feinstein concluded that ‘Rauschenberg’s intention…was to provoke the spectator to look. He sought to create works that would be sufficiently interesting and complex to sustain prolonged observation, works that would yield information through time’.60 This point is further enforced by Carl Goldstein, who stated: ‘Rauschenberg…saw the Abstract Expressionists as having gone very far in the identification of the means of painting, paint and surface, but as having hardly begun to explore the material and property of these means’.61
Later in the 1950’s Rauschenberg began to explore the materiality of art even further, through his series of ‘Combines’. As the name suggests, these works included ‘non-art attachments: a pillow suspended horizontally from the lower frame; a grounded ladder inserted between the painted panels;…a chair standing against a wall but ingrown with the painting behind’.62 For Leo Steinberg, this was all part of the shift in art from nature to culture.63 Having experimented with the ultimate abstraction, within Greenberg’s terms, Rauschenberg had moved to the materiality of art, rejecting self expression in favour of the world around us. Rosalind Krauss, commenting on the ‘Combines’, maintains: ‘It is not about an object transformed…it is a matter…of an object transferred…By never transcending the material world, the image is unambiguously identified with that material world’.64
The aspect of ‘non-art’ appearing in Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’, is similar to the ‘Prepared Piano’ compositions by John Cage. These were pieces whereby the piano had been ‘prepared’ through the addition of what could be called ‘non-musical’ elements, such as screws and bolts, cardboard and forks. The resultant percussive nature, being ‘emphasised by the fact that some of the modifications meant that specific strings could lose absolute pitch’.65
In 1959, Rauschenberg began to investigate the conjunction of vision and sound by ‘embedding three radios beneath the surface of the Combine painting, ‘Broadcast’.66 The radios were set up in such a way that no two would ever play the same station or would be at the same volume. Brandon W. Joseph believes this to have been influenced by Cage’s 1951 composition ‘Imaginary Landscape #4’, in which twelve radios were ‘played’ by 24 performers, based on the aspect of chance.67 This is significant, as previously, John Cage had spoken of the importance of a kind of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, asking: ‘Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music resembles nature’.68
The fact that Rauschenberg was experimenting with sound in his work, and Cage had already been interested in the combination of arts as his ‘Happenings’ prove, goes toward the blurring of boundaries that was such an important aspect in the demise of Modernism. It was as important as the shift of emphasis from internally expressive ideals to those which were concerned with materiality and the immediate everyday world.
As Michel Fried stated in 1967, signalling a complete U-turn on Greenberg’s essay on Modernism, ‘painting is here seen as an art on the verge of exhaustion, one in which the range of acceptable solutions to a basic problem- how to organize the surface of the picture- is severely restricted.’.69 Later in the article, Fried depicts a description by Tony Smith one night, marvelling at the power of nature from the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike: ‘I thought to myself, it ought to be clear that’s the end of art. Most painting looks pretty pictorial after that. There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it’.70 In one further development, on the subject of the relationship between the arts and theatre, Fried mentions the crumbling barriers between the arts, with the arts themselves ‘at last sliding towards some kind of final, implosive, hugely desirable synthesis’.71
There is just one further aspect regarding the move away from Modernism in the work of Rauschenberg and Cage that I would like to describe here, and that is of repetition. The works ‘Factum I and II’ of 1957, were seen by Joseph as being a ‘parodic attack on Abstract Expressionism’s pretensions to originality’.72 The two paintings are seemingly identical duplications of one apparently spontaneous work by another. However Rauschenberg claimed that ‘neither one of these paintings was an imitation of the other…I was interested in the role that accident played in my work’.73 When looking at the two pictures, many differences do begin to emerge. These differences are related to time and space; there are two burning buildings at different times, the calendars, two Eisenhower portraits at the upper right at seemingly different view points.74 Doubt and uncertainty fill the viewer when looking at them for some time. John Cage commented on the works:
‘Hallelujah! The blind can see again. Blind to what he has seen so that one experiences this, for example, with the two Eisenhower pictures which for all intents and purposes are the same?...Everything is so much the same, one becomes acutely aware of the differences, and quickly. And where, as here, the intention is unchanging, it is clear that the differences are unintentional, as unintended as they were in the White Paintings where nothing was done’.75
Joseph elaborates on this suggesting that as with ‘the ‘White Paintings’, the repetitions within the ‘Factums’ are not static, but work to reveal the effects of such an external non-anthropocentric force of difference’, relating this back to Cage’s Bergsonian and Duchampian influences.76 This shows ‘Factums’ to be a further experiment into the character of nature and the everyday world, one that had begun with the ‘organic nature of silence’.
THE SILENT PLIGHT. Having considered ‘White Paintings’ and ‘4’33”’, or more specifically the nature of a noisy aural and visual silence, it is possible to see the importance it played in the work of Rauschenberg and Cage. For Cage, silence was an aspect that he had been considering and experimenting with for a while, having been influenced by the likes of Duchamp, Zen Buddhism and Bergson. Through these influences, Cage’s own impact on Rauschenberg’s feeling towards art is also undeniable, proving to be just what he needed in clarifying the uncertainties and helping in the direction Rauschenberg was to take. However, interestingly enough, it took Rauschenberg’s work of visual art to provide Cage with the inspiration to compose his silent piece. To reverse Walter Pater’s famous phrase, Cage’s music was literally aspiring ‘towards the condition’ of art.77
Silence, or rather the lack of, helped provide the necessary means for the move away from Modernism. Seeing and hearing ‘nothing’ resulted in the increased awareness of the immediate world, drawing our attention to that most important of things: real life.
NOTES:
1. John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’ (1957), in Silence, (Marion Boyars, London, 1999), p8.
2. Roni Feinstein, ‘The Early Work of Robert Rauschenberg: The White Paintings, the Black Paintings, and the Elemental Sculptures’, Arts Magazine, (vol. 61, September, 1986, pp28-37), p28.
3. David Jeffreys, Robert Rauschenberg: Art, Originality and Ethics, (Essex Ph.D thesis, 2001), p93.
4. William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances, (Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam, 1996), p69.
5. John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist and His Work’, in op. cit, Silence, p98.
6. John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, in Keats Poetry and Prose, ed. Henry Ellershaw, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1969), p110.
7. Op. cit, Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, p8.
8. Op. cit, Feinstein, p30.
9. On the nature of his compositions, Cage stated: ‘some employ chance operations, derived from sources as ancient as the Chinese Book of Changes, or as modern as the tables of random numbers used also by physicists in research’. See: op. cit, Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, p10. For an example, hear his ‘Music of Changes’, the result of chance operations. Mark Morris commented on the nature of the pieces: having composed music that relied on meticulous notation and mathematical exactitude, derived from the 12-note tone row developed by Schoenberg, ‘with Music of Changes, (for piano, in four volumes, 1951), Cage’s ideas took a radical new turn, and one that was to become exceedingly influential. Following his reading of the Chinese I Ching, he abandoned his careful delineation of all the parameters of his music, and allowed some of them to be determined by chance (specifically by charts and by the throwing of dice). See: Mark Morris, The Pimlico Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Composers, (Pimlico, London, 1996), pp483-486.
10. Obviously Jung had a similar interest in oriental philosophy, specifically the ‘I Ching’. See Jung’s forward to the English translation: The I Ching or Book of Changes, trans. Cary F. Baynes, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1951).
11. On the subject of his influences Cage stated: ‘It is possible to make a connection between the two, but neither Dada nor Zen is a fixed tangible- they change; and in quite different ways in different places and times, they invigorate action’. Op. cit, Cage, Silence, pxi. Just how influenced Cage was by Dada and Duchamp, as well as the philosophy of Bergson, will be returned to later in the essay. However, for now it is sufficient to point out that Cage met Duchamp, and stayed with Max Ernst on several occasions, being close friends with Walter and Louise Arensberg. He also composed the very minimalist ‘Music for Marcel Duchamp’, in 1947. See: op. cit, Silence, p12, op. cit, Morris, p484, and David Hopkins, After Modern Art, 1945-2000, (Oxford History of Art, Oxford, 2000), p41. Of some importance is Cage’s interview with Moira Roth and William Roth, whereby Cage describes his friendship with Duchamp, basically stemming from Cage’s composition of the music in Duchamp’s ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy’. See their article: ‘John Cage on Marcel Duchamp’, in Art in America, (no.61, Nov.-Dec., 1973), pp72-79.
12. Op. cit, Feinstein, p28.
13. Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, in Styles of Radical Will, (Secker and Warburg, London, 1966), p7.
14. Sontag elaborates: ‘The most the artist can do is to modify the different terms in this situation vis-à-vis the audience and himself. To discuss the idea of silence in art is to discuss the various alternatives within this essentially unalterable situation’. In ibid, p9.
15. Ibid, p9.
16. Ibid, p31.
17. Ibid.
18. Brandon W. Joseph, ‘White on White’, in Critical Inquiry 27, (no. 1, Autumn, 2000, pp90-121), p104. Cage continued by stating that they even made him fear that the development of music had fallen behind that of art.
19. The score was made for Irwin Kremen in 1953. See: op. cit, Fetterman, p77.
20. Ibid, p28.
21. Op. cit, Hopkins, p41.
22. Op. cit, Feinstein, p28.
23. Op. cit, Hopkins, p41.
24. Op. cit, Cage, Silence, pp98-108.
25. Ibid, paraphrase of relevant points in article, pp98-108.
26. Op. cit, Jeffreys, p87.
27. Op. cit, Feinstein, p28.
28. Ibid, p30.
29. Op. cit, Jeffreys, p138. The influence that Abstract Expressionism had on Rauschenberg is immense however, and cannot be underplayed. There are many similarities between his work and that of the ‘colour-field’ painters such as Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and above all Barnett Newman, although none really experimented with total monochrome. It is also important to point out that the confusion in Rauschenberg at this time may well have been the beginning of a certain disillusion with the movement, with Cage helping Rauschenberg to ‘reinforce certain tendencies’, acting as the catalyst as it were, and the move to Postmodernism. This is all relevant later, and will thus be discussed in more detail.
30. Ibid, p115.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid, p140.
33. Ibid, p141.
34. Op. cit, Sontag, p12.
35. Op. cit, Jeffreys, p142.
36. Op. cit, Silence, pxi.
37. Op. cit, Hopkins, p41.
38. Ibid.
39. Op. cit, Joseph, p97.
40. Ibid, pp101-103, or see op. cit, Moira Roth and William Roth, p78.
41. John Cage, ‘Julliard Lecture’, in A Year From Monday, (Calder and Boyars, London, 1968), p102.
42. Op. cit, Silence, pp11-12.
43. Op. cit, Joseph, p106. The quote originates in: Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans., Arthur Mitchell, (Dover Publications, New York, 1998), p278.
44. Op. cit, Joseph, p106.
45. Ibid.
46. Op. cit, Bergson, p273.
47. Op. cit, Joseph, p107.
48. Ibid, p108.
49. Ibid, p109.
50. Ibid, p113.
51. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1960), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.4, ed. John O’Brien, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993), pp85-87.
52. Op. cit, Jeffreys, p61.
53. Ibid, p118.
54. Mark Rothko from a statement published in July 1945 in ‘The New York Times’. See: David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism, (Thames and Hudson World of Art, London, 1990), p15.
55. Op. cit, Feinstein, p28.
56. See op. cit Jeffreys, p108. Jeffreys maintains that ‘the young Rauschenberg wasn’t associated enough with colour-field painters to share their seeking of the sublime in his White Paintings, merely knowing as much of them as critics and public, and through Black Mountain College’.
57. Earlier paintings reiterate this, such as ‘Man with Two Souls’, Mother of God’ and ‘Trinity’. See: op. cit, Feinstein, p28.
58. Ibid, p30. This of course relates to the philosophy of Zen and Bergson, and also harkens the work of Duchamp.
59. Ibid, p32.
60. Ibid, p33.
61. Op. cit, Jeffreys, p127.
62. Leo Steinberg, ‘Reflections on the State of Criticism’, (1972) in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Brandon W. Joseph, (October Files, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2002), p29.
63. Ibid.
64. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image’, (1974), in ibid, p50.
65. However, Cage was experimenting with this much earlier than Rauschenberg, with the first piece (entitled ‘Bacchanale’, with ‘Prepared Piano’ appearing in the score) appearing in 1940. See: op. cit, Morris, p484.
66. Brandon W. Joseph, ‘A Duplication Containing Duplications’, (2001), in ibid, p139.
67. Ibid.
68. Op. cit, Silence, p12.
69. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, (1967), in Minimal Art: a Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, (University of California Press, Berkley, 1995), p118. It is interesting to note however, that Fried was intending the article as an attack on the likes of Cage and Rauschenberg, being more in favour of the developing Minimalist movement, and phenomenological overtones associated with the works. However, albeit an attack, he nonetheless points out the aspects that were to signify important characteristics within Postmodernism, and the move toward ‘Land Art’, ‘Performance Art, and ‘Body Art’.
70. Ibid, p131.
71. Ibid, p141. Again, however, this is tongue-in-cheek for Fried, as under the heading ‘Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre’, he directly attacks Cage and Rauschenberg, suggesting that the music of Elliott Carter and the painting of Morris Louis is superior to their own, precisely because it does not blur the boundaries.
72. Op. cit, Joseph, A Duplication of Duplications, p142.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid, p143.
75. Op. cit, Silence, p102.
76. Op. cit, Joseph, p146.
77. Pater’s phrase being that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’. See: Walter Pater, ‘The School of Giorgione’, in The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips, (Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford, 1998), p86.
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