john cage: composed in america by kenneth goldsmith
John Cage • composed in america, Edited by Marjorie Perloff & Charles Junkerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
In early 1992, I went to see John Cage
read on a Sunday at a small church in New York City. He read for 45 minutes
to an audience of maybe 20 people; the room held more, but there were
many empty seats. I felt fortunate to be at this event—an intimate
gathering with one of the three or four major 20th-century cultural figures
before me. Although at this point Cage was considered “classical”
(“classical” meaning that which has been classified—Gertrude
Stein), he still did many of these small gigs when the opportunity arose.
I looked around again—I saw about me a withering, aging congregation,
albeit faithful, who came to hear Cage preach. Born in 1961, I must have
been the youngest in the room.
On the way home, I began to think about what I had just seen. His presence,
words, and manner all impressed me. His lecture had a compellingly open,
ethical underpinning that seemed particularly timely. I couldn’t
help but wonder, why did Cage no longer have the cultural power and pull
that he had in his heyday of the 1960s and 70s? Twenty-five years ago,
thousands flocked to his concerts (the first Musicircus in 1969 was attended
by over 2,000 people), and he was regarded somewhat as a wizened older
guru (both in the “art” sense and as a Pop culture icon) to
the seething youth culture. One need only look at the books produced on
Cage at the time to see his enormous sway. Slowly though, the country
changed. After the Vietnam War and Watergate, the mood of the nation’s
youth shifted away from the utopian/radical possibilities in both politics
and culture and moved toward a more self-centered materialism. As the
70s wore on, Cage seemed to be increasingly marginalized (not, of course,
by his own doing) as a functioning radical thinker and began the transformation
into a museum relic. He was now an important historical artifact, for
whom great crowds would appear at sanctioned museum events, see a piece
of living history, and go home.
However, Cage himself never softened. The culture might have moved on,
but he kept his radical edge, continuing his revolution in a quiet way
for those who cared not only to listen, but to act on and live by his
words. Through the 1980s, Cage’s influence was felt in the underground,
influencing many of the more interesting cultural movements of that decade—the
birth of indy rock, the renewal of Conceptual Art, and the rise of Language
Poetry. Many of these artists studied Cage in the 60s and 70s and went
on to synthesize newer aesthetic/cultural concerns with older Cageian
ideals. While the 80s played out in the media with Wall Street yuppies
and decadent consumerists grabbing the spotlight, many of us spent time
on the edge of the culture, sowing the seeds for the more politically
charged times in which we now live.
Given their timeliness, I thought that Cage’s social and ethical
ideals would have been embraced by an emerging politic. But I was wrong.
As I looked around me, I saw the rise of multiculturalism and political
correctness—initially not bad ideas at all—but as the dialogue
deepened, these movements seemed to embrace separation and closure, a
single-mindedly “correct” meaning opposed to Cageian ideas of
open inclusiveness (“Here Comes Everybody” and lack of center).
I finally had to ask myself, what could Cage possibly mean to my generation?
When I got home, I pulled out all of my books about and by Cage. I looked
at the copyright dates—1961, 1965, 1967, 1971, 1975, 1976, 1981,
and 1992. Ah! Nineteen ninety-two! David Revill’s biography of John
Cage, The Roaring Silence, had just come out. Perhaps in some way this
book could answer my question and place Cage in a contemporary light.
However, the problem was that this book could have been written in 1966.
Shrouded in reverence and privacy, we were only allowed a certain view
of this approachable genius. And if we didn’t obey the code, there
was a certain wrath to bear; Cage was approachable, yet all approached
with caution. I have read that when John laughed, everyone laughed—such
was his power. Certain subjects were taboo. In Revill’s book, the
paragraph that deals with Cage’s homosexuality is closed:
“The imminent breakup with Xenia was not only the loss of one relationship,
an important one, but of a sexual orientation and an identity. The catalyst
can be seen, with hindsight, as Merce Cunningham; he and Cage would become
partners in the personal as well as artistic sense. Exactly what happened
is not clear and not important. It is not clear because the protagonists
have kept the matter private (indeed, one young speaker at a conference
at Stanford University in 1992 was censured by the chairman for mentioning
Cage’s homosexuality “because” Cage does not). The details
are not important given the aims of this book; all that is important is
that a crisis of a marriage and a sexual orientation occurred, and Cage’s
life-decisions, work and thought need to be placed within that context.”
Revill never mentions the subject again. This type of veiled biography
seemed irresponsible and unthinkable in 1992. How could Revill keep silent
about such a subject in the middle of the AIDS crisis after so much work
had been done to dismantle thick closet walls over the previous 10 years,
not to mention the heated discussion that had been raging surrounding
the issues of gender and identity? This was just one of many ways in which
his book just did not seem up to date.
How different this is in comparison to Thomas Hines’ essay “Not
Yet Cage” in the new Composed In America. Hines reports a conversation
with Cage where he reveals his favorite cruising spot in Los Angeles in
the early 1930s. “ ‘Contact with the rest of society was through
(cruising) the parks,’ (Cage) remembered. ‘For me it was Santa
Monica along the Palisades.’ ” Wow! Now that’s more like
it! Hines’ acute political, temporal, and cultural awareness in this
essay make it quite clear that he would refuse to treat the subject as
taboo. This appears to me to be an open and contemporary approach to biography.
Or how about Joan Retallack’s appendix essay “Revisions to Overpopulation
and Art”? This is a truly amazing document telling how Cage, upon
having been made aware of the patriarchal and male-dominated language
in his mesostics, went and revised them. For example:
Line 126
original: or should he Put himself aside
revised: or should artists be Put aside
or Line 592
original: by mAn
revised: by humAn beings
or Line 595
original: which man invents sO that
revised: which are invented sO that
Here is a remarkable instance of the “protagonist” himself adjusting
his own agenda to move with the times. The appendix opens with the statement
“That John Cage was open to criticism of his work until the end of
his life will surprise no one who knew him. In this sense he was experimental
in a way that scientists would recognize—exploring the unnoticed
and the new while testing his conceptual framework against what he regarded
as important ‘reality principles.’ He wanted his work to have
useful consequences in the world and it couldn’t have that if it
was somehow off-base, inappropriate, irrelevant.” Cage’s actions
and this statement suggest to me that it was not Cage who left, but the
general population who veered off the utopian ethical pathway. I was beginning
to get an answer to my question.
I next turned to Gordana P. Crnkovic’s essay “Utopian America
and The Language of Silence,” which presents a fascinating idea.
She begins her essay discussing a visit to Prague during the wane of Communism.
There, she and a friend created a utopian view of America that was based
in opposition to whatever information was officially being given by the
government. Hence, she idealized America as a horizontal social structure
in direct opposition to Eastern Europe’s verticality. She got a hold
of John Cage’s Silence and in it found her “Utopian America,”
“one able to acknowledge the validity of each of the numerous, unfixed
centers of society.” She readily admits that this utopian notion
had no correspondence to the “real” America but as there was
no impartial Western information available, these sorts of utopian fantasy
constructions were evidently commonplace.
She spends the rest of the essay showing examples of Cage’s writing
that support, both in theory and practice, her “Utopian America.”
It is indeed a language foreign to the ideological and political concerns
of late Communism; the vocabulary includes such ideas as the language
of question, the language of self-alteration, and open multi-directional
language working against closure.
All very nice, I thought to myself, but this is dated material—the
collapse of Communism happened over five years ago and a new set of problems,
equally repugnant and vertical, had risen—raw-boned Capitalism. And
then it struck me—it was a trade of one set of verticality for another,
Communism for Capitalism. The “Utopian America” that Crnkovic
fantasized about remains unrealized, both here and in Europe—and
as late Capitalism continues to spread like wildfire around the globe,
notions of horizontality seem more necessary than ever. However, utopian
thinking alone does not seem to cut it here. Crnkovic, as well as the
rest of the authors in this book, seem to want action. How does she propose
this will happen? The answer comes at the very end of the essay where
she discusses the “reality factor” in any Cage performance.
Crnkovic declares (bravely, I might add) that Cage himself is a vertical
structure—after all, someone has to invent the language of freedom
and set the system in motion. She repeatedly uses the notion of “materialism”
in regard to Cage, as if practice is the real way to cut through the layers
and layers of useless ideology and propaganda. So, once again, I found
myself pleased with the notion of action and usefulness—timely and
important concerns for a younger generation.
Funny things happen to a person after they die—suddenly it’s
as if the closet doors are permitted to be opened and all sorts of repressed
and hidden things come tumbling out. Hence, another important aspect of
the book: it is the first to come out on Cage since his death and in this
respect alone it’s remarkable because we are able to see the composer
in a fully dimensional form that was withheld while he lived. This is
the case with Marjorie Perloff’s contribution “A Duchamp Unto
Myself,” which deals with Cage’s sublimated and repressed desire
for Marcel Duchamp, and Jann Pasler’s “Inventing a Tradition:
Cage’s ‘Composition in Retrospect,’ “ which discusses
Cage’s rewriting of his own history. These are outrageous essays,
really. In the case of Perloff, I never could envision anyone positing
such a theory while Cage was alive. It’s truly juicy.
Perloff deals with issues of identity and desire, both public and private.
She also entertains the very pertinent notion of one’s image and
the means by which one manipulates and controls the public perception
of that image. And what concern could be more up-to-the-minute than one’s
notion of one’s “media-self”?
Cage, as Pasler tells us, was a master in shaping our perception of him.
So was Duchamp. As it turns out, they did it in very different ways—Duchamp
was fleshy French eroticism, and Cage was WASPy American repression. Perloff
quotes Duchamp discussing erotica as “a thing that everybody understands
. . . to be able to reveal them (erotic things), and place them at everyone’s
disposal—I think that this is important because it’s the basis
of everything, and no one talks about it.” It’s a funny contrast
to Cage, who celebrated the wonder and awareness of one’s daily life
but repressed the thing that is “the basis of everything.”
Perloff’s thesis is that there was an erotic and sexual side to Duchamp’s
work that Cage could never assimilate. She states “Ironically, the
real appeal of Duchamp for Cage (‘I love him and he . . . changed
my life’) may have had less to do with Marcel’s work than with
his enticing presence—the exotic image of the man smiling enigmatically
over the chessboard or appearing in drag as Rrose Selavy.” This brings
the subject around to image control and manipulation. Perloff and Pasler
make me aware in these essays that Cage controlled his public image to
the same extent as Andy Warhol. One of the things that makes Cage so relevant
to us is his media savvy. Cage not only used electronic media in his work
but also had a sense very early on about how to use media to his advantage
(his close affiliation with Marshall McLuhan was no coincidence). Perloff
discusses Cage’s rewriting of his own and Duchamp’s history
(through the mesostic work “Alphabet”) to have us see Cage as
Cage wanted us to see him. Cage was Warholian in this way but in my opinion
(and many will surely disagree with me), Cage was sacrificing/altering
his ego in order to show us an alternative way to live and be in the world,
whereas Warhol was complicit with the economic and ethical systems of
Capitalism. So in a way, Cage’s media manipulation was forgivable—showing
us a higher good—whereas Warhol’s manipulation showed us a mirror
of our ugly selves and seemed to offer no alternative.
Composed In America centers around a Cage Musicircus held at Stanford
University in 1992, beautifully described by Charles Junkerman in the
opening “nEw / foRms of living together: The Model of the Musicircus.”
Junkerman tells us that the Musicircus is a model that envisions a utopian
possibility for humanity. It involves a horizontal, decentered, non-judgmental
community effort that includes all who wish to partake. Cage’s main
thrust in the Musicircus is that one musician might stop trying to play
in time with the other musicians around him/her in order to be able to
function as an interdependent, non-interfering entity. This is the opposite
approach to Western music where an orchestra, say, is supposed to function
like a well-unified machine. Awareness and openness is required of the
individual performers, allowing others to perform in a parallel manner
that promotes less ego-dependence and ultimately freedom. It is a practical
working model of (to use Herbert Lindenberger’s term) “regulated
anarchy.” And working is the key here. This book seems to say that
theory alone is not good enough—theory must then be put to task through
realization. Realization of theory in many cases is extremely experimental
and it takes an open-minded culture to allow the experiment and to accept
the results as proof. Composed In America insists on getting its hands
dirty. It tests theories again and again and accepts them only if they
prove to be workable. This is the pragmatism of Cage—the son of an
inventor and himself “an inventor of genius,” he favored a pragmatic
“American” model of thinking, hence the call to action. Composed
In America picks up this thread and time and again on its pages, theory
is put into practice.
The final essay here is “Poethics of a Complex Realism” by Joan
Retallack, and note the word realism in the title. Retallack begins her
essay with an invocation of American pragmatist John Dewey’s “Art
As Experience” and launches into a long discussion of the idea of
weather as it relates to the ideas of John Cage. Cage said that he wanted
his music to be like the weather—unpredictable, omnidirectional,
impermanent, and always changing—a complex system that parallels
the conditions of our daily life. He did several works involving the weather,
modeling his ideas after nature (again, a tip of the hat to American transcendentalist
Henry David Thoreau), which are described here. Retallack takes the wordplay
of weather/whether and sets up a correspondence between the physical (realized)
and the theoretical (unrealized). She then posits an ethic based on the
principle of weather/whether. Imagine, she says, a culture sophisticated
and open enough to be able to accept difference and otherness, a culture
that rejects the oversimplified media response of black/white, yes/no,
a culture that embraces complexity and contradiction—a “breathable”
culture. And it is here that the book brilliantly dovetails with the multicultural
attitudes sweeping the country today. Cage stands in opposition to the
reductive and closed ideas that multiculturalism has come to stand for.
While multiculturalism plays by the media-supplied dualistic rules, Cage
seems to dump the idea of rules altogether and instead celebrates the
idea of difference and unpredictability as a prerequisite to understanding
and accepting the difficulties inherent in a pluralistic culture. It appeals
to this reader as the path of least resistance and being based in action,
seems entirely workable. The multicultural debate has made many people
aware of the issues, but it stands in theory only and lacks the kind of
pragmatism and functionality that could lead to real change as prescribed
here.
The remainder of the book for me is like the Cageian experience of mushroom
hunting in the forest. You might go out looking for one thing and yet
along the way stumble across something you could never have imagined.
Cage taught us to appreciate and enjoy these finds as much as the trove
we initially set out to look for. The other essays scattered throughout
the book cover a fascinating variety of topics on specific fields, and
look at Cage through the lenses of those realms. There are essays on Cage
and ethical theory, science, opera, and “the global.”
These contributions function in letting us see more angles of John Cage
than we ever could have imagined. For example, I never have read ethical
theory, but I quickly found myself engrossed in Gerald L. Bruns’
article “Poethics: John Cage and Stanley Clavell at the Crossroads
of Ethical Theory.” Cage provides a window for me to enter into a
dialogue that was previously unbeknownst to me. Another case is Herbert
Lindenberger’s essay on Cage’s Europeras, “Regulated Anarchy.”
This is a brilliant essay by a man who obviously knows his field—it
is lively and entertaining and I can’t help but think how appropriate
it might be in a book devoted specifically to opera—it will really
shake up readers who are traditional opera lovers. Like traveling along
the forest path in search of mushrooms, Composed In America gently twists
and turns as it goes along its way, but the reader should be warned that
there is one patch of quicksand: Daniel Herwitz’s “John Cage’s
Approach To The Global.” This essay starts out lively but quickly
disintegrates into a deadly, dull line-by-line reading of a mesostic that
becomes swamped in a thick stew of sleepy theory. It is the only essay
in the book where theory takes precedence over practice and the results
are languidly stultifying.
After reading Composed In America, I went to put it on the shelf with
all my other books on Cage. Deciding where it should go, I realized that
Composed In America is approximately the same size and shape of all of
Cage’s books published by Wesleyan. Is this any coincidence? Probably
not. This is a savvy book, one that has one eye on the past and one eye
on the future. Composed In America is the book on Cage we’ve been
thirsting for—finally, a book that moves John Cage squarely into
the 90s and sheds much-needed light on the relevancy of his thought for
the current generation. In doing so it performs a dual function—it
allows us to see the man as he has never been seen before and it sets
a radical agenda for the propagation of his ideas after his death and
far into the future.Kenneth Goldsmith
New York, New York
1995