Difference and Discipline: The Cage/Cunningham Aesthetic Revisited

Abstract

Indeterminacy, fluidity, anarchy, the non-hierarchical, the multiplex: these have usually been understood as the attributes of John Cage's and Merce Cunningham's musical and dance pieces, so many of which were made in collaboration. But to study the works themselves rather than the artist's statements of intention is to understand that theirs is in fact a simulated or regulated anarchy, a ‘natural’ form that turns out to be highly controlled and designed by the two artists. What Cage called ‘purposeless play’—‘a way of waking up to the very life we're living’—is planned down to the last detail as is Cunningham's choreography of decenteredness and “natural” movement. What is presented as open form turns out to be a rule-based practice. Indeed, it is the very combination of authorial control and simulated anarchy that makes such works as Roaratorio (Cage) and Walkaround Time (Cunningham) genuinely new, subversive, and radical vis-à-vis earlier music and dance. These works, with their renewal of what Marcel Duchamp called the infrathin, thus provide paradigms for avant-garde practice in the late twentieth century.

Keywords:

• Avant-Garde
• Anarchy
• Chance
• Decenteredness
• Rule
• Infrathin
• Cage
• Cunningham

Notes

For images of the Cage/Cunningham loft, see the website of the John Cage Trust as well as Google Images.

According to Kenneth Silverman, within three years of moving into the loft (1982), Cage had acquired 203 plants and trees and spent the first two hours of each day gardening. As for the street noise from Sixth Avenue, Silverman cites Cage as saying, ‘I can't think of any sonic experience that I've had that is superior to the sound that is freely given and received here on Sixth Avenue’ (Silverman, 2010, pp. 310–311).

For a somewhat different emphasis, see Perloff (1991, pp. 21–26). See also Cantu (2010); for Cage's own discussion of the Lecture, see 1979, pp. 3–5.

For a clip from this performance of Ocean, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aBJdHnv5tM&feature=related/

By extension, difference also points to sexual difference, the Cage circle—Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and by extension Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery—being almost entirely one of gay men. But that would be the subject for a different essay.

The notes are reproduced as facsimile scraps, with the French and English print versions at the bottom of the page. Slash marks indicate the end of the line in the handwritten version. The book is unpaginated but the notes are numbered. See also de Duve (1984, p. 160, 1991); and Perloff (2002, pp. 14–20).

In one of the conversations with Retallack in Musicage, Cage, citing Jasper Johns, says, ‘This is very much like Wittgenstein … “We say one thing is not another thing./Or sometimes we say it is./Or we say they are the same”’ (58).

I discuss the 1978 IRCAM production of Roaratorio, which was not originally designed as a dance piece, in Perloff (1992, pp. 149–61).

Cage frequently refers back to this aphorism in his later work.

See also Johnston (1965, p. 334).

For a detailed analysis of the composition of Roaratorio, see Perloff (1989).

Ibid., 19.

‘I've always been opposed to records,’ Cage tells Dick Higgins in 1976 (1994, p. 118). Or again, in 1982, ‘I don't like recordings because they turn music into an object, and music is actually a process that's never twice the same’ (237). ‘All [hi-fi records do] is move toward a faithful reproduction of something that's already happened … I don't collect records, including my own’ (237–238). In conversation with Daniel Charles, Cage compares records to postcards ‘which ruin the landscape’ (Cage & Charles, 1981, p. 50).

See Perloff (2007); Duchamp's essay in question, ‘The Creative Act,’ is found in Duchamp (1973, pp. 138–140).

There are excellent images of Walkaround Time available on Google Images, drawing on various performances and archives.

Walkaround Time was later returned to the repertoire, but with facsimiles of Johns's art pieces.

A similar point is made about Cage's Europeras in Lindenberger (1994, pp. 144–166).

Brown was one of the leading dancers in the company from its inception in 1953 to 1972,when she resigned to take an administrative position. She had to come to terms withthe reality that for Cage and Cunningham, no dancer, however brilliant, was indispensable.