John Cage

Cage’s visual art, his drawings, prints, and watercolours created by his use of the I Ching have been a particular source of inspiration for me. There is something in his attitude to making that extends from his musical career into his visual art in that he gives ‘sight [to] silence’ (Kass, 2011), I find this to be such an interesting association between his way of working and my own in trying to capture something invisible (like silence, or the breath) and catching or fixing something of it in place for it to be seen. 

It is his ability to bring about a ‘focused visual experience’ (Kass, 2011; 17) and yet at the same lose nothing of the integrity of barely perceptible states that I want to attempt to hone within my own works. Note the ‘focused visual experience’ it is something lived, a heightened awareness of something happening. ‘…His work…proceed[ed] from the openness of experience. Openness to experience led him to the pleasure of discovery…a conceptual fluidity that could dramatize the strange and delightful interconnectedness of things’ (Kass, 2011; 14). In this way, ‘a work of art, Cage contended, could – even should – have sufficient impact on our lives that it could sustain and influence our responses even long after we had seen it…helping [people] attain a more intense awareness of their own life, not only in the concert hall but during every waking moment’ (Kass, 2011; 14,15). In the same way that music notation communicates and asks something to/of its performer, the marks and compositions Cage creates communicates and asks something of its viewer – to be aware. It is a very particular kind of awareness though, it is egoless and elemental with an ambience that could almost be akin to ‘being like weather, because weather shows broad comprehensible patterns, infused with unpredictable details’ (Kass, 2011; 26).

While I find his works visually arresting, my own work differs from Cage’s in the fact that his remains two dimensional. Being bound to the page is not a dimension I want to stay in. There is also something of a limitation for me in his use of chance operations. This is a very particular process and not one I am closely aligned to. However, I do like the way in which it takes away some of the aspects which are controlled by the artists hand and gives itself over to the process, because this, to me, has a real sense of working with, a collaboration, with the materials you are using and the process itself inflecting the work. It means it’s not all about you (the artist)! That humble spontaneity which sits between expressive gesture and the materials you use is exactly the proximity I am after.