John Cage


Ray Kass and John Cage at the Mountain Lake Horton Studio, 1988	John Cage, New River Watercolor, Series IV, #4, 1988, 26 in. X 40 in.

In 1988 Cage’s schedule finally permitted him to return to Mountain Lake. At the beginning of April he arrived at the Horton Center and remained for a week-long workshop during which four series of works were produced. Following upon the 1983 “painting experiment,” stones collected from the New River were sorted into three groups according to size, which were separately numbered; numerous and varied brushes were divided into two separately numbered groups; likewise, feathers to paint with, colors and washes, and papers were also divided and numbered.25 In this way, chance procedures using pages of random numbers that were now generated by a computer program could be used to determine the specific materials utilized for each painting (e.g., which painting instruments, what type of paper and which colors, how many washes, which stones to paint around, where to locate the stones on the paper).26

Because chance is generally considered the opposite of the predictable and the rational, the use of chance procedures has been one of the most controversial aspects of Cage’s work since he began to use the I CHING in 1951 to compose MUSIC FOR CHANGES and IMAGINARY LANDSCAPE No. 4. Even French composer Pierre Boulez, who had been a close friend of Cage for years, finally broke with him in 1962 over the use of chance.27 However, the reason Cage turned to chance was that although he was interested in expression, he was not interested in self-expression. From Zen Buddhism he came to believe that to truly experience the world around oneself one had to free the mind and the self from control by the ego. Ego, according to Zen, is the one barrier to experience because ego, which is connected to emotion, taste, memory, and desire, fixates on pre-conceived expectations and aesthetic possibilities, on the already known. In this way it prevents exploration and experience of the new. Chance, on the other hand, was a way to rise above control by the ego into new and unexplored territory. This could happen because once an overall format for a work was consciously created, chance allowed unexpected things to happen; chance allowed musical or visual “events” to occur, without the ego’s intervention at the conscious level of taste or the subconcious level of desire. The artist then would be in a new situation which required a conscious, disciplined response. Chance, when understood properly, still involved discipline, discipline to not do just anything, but to free oneself from, as Cage said, “likes and dislikes” in order to explore and experiment.28 For Cage, chance was to be used as a discipline and not, as some people allege, as a way of giving up choices. “My choices,” he said “consist in choosing what questions to ask.”29