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The Anarchy of Silence. John Cage and experimental art was the first exhibition to frame the work of composer, artist and philosopher John Cage (Los Angeles, 1912 – New York, 1992)) in its historical context, analysing the profound influence of his aesthetic and sound investigations on the visual, musical and performing arts from the 1940s to the present.

The exhibition approached the composer's career chronologically, starting in the thirties with his contributions to percussion music, pausing to look at his compositions for "prepared piano" in the forties, reviewing his groundbreaking use of the concepts of randomness and indetermination in the fifties, and culminating in his technological experimentations from the sixties to the eighties. Although it would also be possible to see journey beginning with the noise of the First Construction (in Metal) (1939) and gradually leading to the silence of his legendary 4'33'' (1952), particularly given that his scores – in the twofold physical and conceptual sense – were the core of the exhibition.

A central area was set aside for illustrating Cage's prolific web of collaborations with the artists of his time, which contributed decisively to expanding the boundaries of artistic languages and reconfiguring the relationship between the artwork, public and creator. Marcel Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, and the members of Fluxus were some of the members of his artistic circle.

His name is highly familiar, but his work not widely or well known. John Cage (1912-92) defined such a radical practice of musical composition that he changed the course of modern music in the last century and shaped a new conceptual horizon for post-war art. With the aim of capturing the relevance of Cage's contribution to contemporary art, the MACBA presents the most extensive exhibition to be devoted to the artist on the international stage since his death.

The display will trace a path through the artist's career, from his initial works in the 1930s, pieces that broadened the parameters of percussion music by incorporating the most unconventional of instruments, leading to his "prepared piano," moving to his famous theory on 'silence' (and the score 4'33"), his pathbreaking deployment of chance and then indeterminacy, and culminating his innovative multimedia work, which began in the 1960s and continued through the 1980s. One of the main sections of the exhibition will chart the network of repercussions as Cage's radical conceptual transformation of "composition" entered the strategies of advanced art. A trajectory framed by dialogues with artists --Marcel Duchamp, Robert Rauschenberg among many others --and reacting to the same emergent media as Andy Warhol.

The exhibition reveals the radical strategies employed by Cage to refine the score and extend its parameters, forging a newly relevant path for the post-Pollock generation of artists. At a time when modern painting and subjectivity were ceasing to be viable formulas of artistic practice, Cage was giving classes of Experimental Composition to a new generation of artists at the New School for Social Research in New York (1956-60). Many of Cage's students and their peers would soon find their place at the center of the rising avant-gardes, from Fluxus to Conceptual Art. Thus Cage became one of the driving forces behind the complete turnabout of post-war art in the early sixties, positioned on the cusp of modernity and post-modernity.

Sound recordings, films, scores, and documentary materials provide an insight into the extraordinary scope of Cage's conceptual and theoretical innovations. To illustrate this, the exhibition will present some of the work he carried out in collaboration with other artists, from the music he made to amplify the visual experience of Marcel Duchamp's rotoreliefs early in his career (1947) to the musico-poetic collaboration with fellow anarchist Jackson Mac Low, through to works with random light, shadow, and ambient sounds of New York City made as part of Rauschenberg's Experiments in Art and Technology project. If Duchamp has emerged as the pivotal figure of the early-mid 20th century, Cage's project now appears as an indispensible paradigm for the late 20th century and into the 21st. Revealing a "Conceptual Cage," the landmarks of his oeuvre will be exhibited in direct relation to key works by contemporaries who shared his commitments to the new, the non-subjective, the changing, and to an embrace of the technology that would redefine all perceptual experience: from Rauschenberg's White Paintings (1951) and Robert Morris's Box with the Sound of its Own Making, (1961), to the new mediascape of Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and beyond.

Curator: Julia Robinson
Production: Exhibition organized by Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and coproduced with Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden

Artist

John Cage
Comunication sponsored by:
Logo TV3
Catalunya Ràdio
El periódico100
With de support of:
Scanner FM
U.S. Consulate General Barcelona
Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona
Sumarroca

Itinerances

23 OCT. 2009 - 10 JAN. 2010 Museum galleries
03 SEP. - 28 NOV. 2010 SCHUNCK, Heerlen, Holand
25 FEB. - 30 MAY 2010 Henie Onstad Art Centre, Norway


Related

Activities

Images

 "The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
 "The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
 "The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
 "The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
 "The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
 "The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
 "The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010
"The anarchy of silence John Cage and experimental art" 2009-2010

Audios

Guided tour by Julia E. Robinson, curator of the exhibition, for the Friends of MACBA
The Anarchy of Silence. John Cage and Experimental Art
FLUXRADIO.
25.11.2009
JOHN CAGE. Notes towards a re-reading of the “Roaratorio”
28.10.2009
Son[i]a #166. James Pritchett
15.11.2012
Son[i]a #79. Carmen Pardo
30.04.2009
Son[i]a #89.
29.10.2009
Son[i]a #90. Margaret Leng Tan
12.11.2009

Publications