John Cage

As a musician, composer, artist, poet, and philosopher, John Cage's work rarely fit within the traditional boundaries of artistic practice. In the late 1940s, during a residency at Black Mountain College, he developed his provocative "theater of mixed-means" in collaboration with the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham. These experiments gave birth to an explosion of performance art in the1950s and 1960s that introduced all types of actions, artifacts, noises, images, and movement into the performance space, such as in his own electronic theater work, Variations V from 1965. The anarchic nature of Cage's work, with its bold acceptance of indeterminacy (chance) as an integral part of its composition, later encouraged the composer to extend this new found freedom to include the participation of the audience. Cage, inspired by Zen Buddhism, revels in an anarchy that dethrones the artist as the heroic, all-powerful arbiter of creative expression. He proposes instead a shift to an inclusive, participatory art that encourages interaction between artist, performer and audience.

John Cage made Variations V in 1965 for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He and David Tudor settled on two systems for the sound to be affected by movement. For the first, Billy Klüver and his colleagues set up a system of directional photocells aimed at the stage lights, so that the dancers triggered sounds as they cut the light beams with their movements. A second system used a series of antennas. When a dancer came within four feet of an antenna a sound would result. Ten photocells were wired to activate tape-recorders and short-wave radios. Cecil Coker designed a control circuit, which was built by my assistant Witt Wittnebert. Film footage by Stan VanDerBeek and Nam June Paik's manipulated television images were projected on screens behind the dancers. The score was created by flipping coins to determine each element and consisted of thirty-five remarks outlining the structure, components, and methodology. The specific sound score would change at each performance as it was created by radio antennas responding to the dancers' movements. In this photograph Variations V is performed for a television taping session in Hamburg. The photocells were located at the base of the five-foot antennas placed around the stage. Cage, Tudor, and Gordon Mumma operate equipment to modify and determine the final sounds. The project was also presented at the Philharmonic Hall in New York, 1965. john cage