John Cage - Great Waster of Time

Time Squandered

John Cage was a believer in the therapeutic value of boredom. One way to induce boredom is to raise expectations that something will happen in time either inside the one who waits, as in enlightenment, or outside in the external sensory world. The disciplined audience according to Cage will learn how to wait for this effect.  Nothing however is guaranteed.  The longer the expectation is unfulfilled, the greater the delay, the sheer quantity of time wasted in the mode of suspended activity, the greater the boredom suffered by the audience, the more acute its disappointment - the higher the spiritual benefits all around.  This rack of waiting resembles the structure of any false promise — “make them live in hope” says Gaveston, “upstart” and favorite of the King, at the beginning of Marlowe’s “Edward the Second”. False promises are also potentially fatal - “Aspettare e non venire è cosa da morire” is a popular Italian folk wisdom — futile waiting is a cause of death.  Cage’s performances were based on the principle of indefinite postponement.  Although for Cage the false promise is more like an implicit contract.  Boredom given by the performer must be equalled and paid for by boredom received from the audience.

Cage spoke freely of these matters in an interview conducted by David Sylvester and Richard Smalley in 1966 included in Sylvester’s collection “Interviews with American Artists” (2001).

Reading the interview now, freed from the dross of social and political trappings so important in ‘the Sixties’ for Cage and others, the bareness and harshness of Cage’s boredom therapy is fully exposed. Sylvester asks him why he likes to bore his audience to the verge of tears:

DS:    But you are asking them to give something?
JC:    Give in terms of the person who is disciplined to giving.
DS:    But the giving of time, you feel, is a part of that which has to be given?
JC:    Well, if something that is being given takes time, 

           then its receiving must take an equal time.

At some point John Cage ceased to be primarily a musician or composer and became instead a thinker or speaker.  He regarded his lectures though as a musical performance of speech, noise or silence.  Cage’s switch took place at a time when renouncing of art by artists in favor of silence or social activism was quite en vogue.  One can hardly imagine this urge today, perhaps because activism now is an obtrusive Doppelgänger of art. ‘Artists-activists’ are a sub-division of the so-called “activism industry” - involved in symbolic and ‘practical’ incursions in the pores of ordinary politics and geopolitics.  As such they are a sign of the further eroding of the distinction between art and ordinary life, which began in the ‘Sixties’. 

In an essay from the same period as Sylvester’s interview, Susan Sontag coined the expedient term “aesthetics of silence” for the bizarre renunciation of art of those days.  Sontag’s view of Cage is adulatory, whereas Sylvester is almost hostile. Curiously, Sylvester’s paring away of Cage’s declarations that ‘art is over’ seems far more contemporary now than Sontag’s affirmation of Cage’s “spirituality”.  One sees Cage’s true assault upon the audience (and indirectly the artist) in far more explicit terms.

“The proper goal of each activity is its obviation.”(John Cage) 
Sylvester almost turns him into a penseur maudit, which flatters Cage in a far more subtle fashion.

JC:    Why are people so stingy about their time?
DS:    Yes.
JC:    Why are they so ungenerous? What in heaven’s name

           is so valuable about 30 minutes or 45 minutes? Or an hour and a half?

Cage had a taste for mental torture like any evangelist.  People must pay him for the generosity with which he wastes their time.  The model for his own behavior is nature itself: “If you look at nature, for instance, it often seems to be wasteful, the number of spores produced by a mushroom in relation to the number that actually reproduce (...). I hope this shift from scarcity to abundance, from pinchpenny mental attitudes to courageous wastefulness, will continue to flourish.” (John Cage, 1968)
Cage wasted his audience using whatever means were handy. Prodigious waiting for nothing was the audience’s forced renunciation to match the chosen renunciation of the artist. Cage of course did not give up anything.  He didn’t consider himself redundant.  He was the waster not the wasted.  Cage muted his prepared pianos as a hitman might put on a silencer.

 

Narrow World of Chance

The Chinese, writes Baudelaire, tell time by looking into the eyes of a cat.

I looked into a book about John Cage smelling of mice.  Hemlock also smells of mice.  It grows in weedy places, in moist, loamy soils next to streams.  Growing forked from the root, it produces many unspectacular umbels.  John Cage was very interested in poisonous mushrooms.  He served them to his friends but ate more than anyone else.  John Cage liked poisonous mushrooms. He served them to his friends and almost died.  He also liked Satie, especially his piece “Socrate”. He would have devoured it too but was prevented from doing so by French copyright law.  Instead Cage made his “Cheap Imitation” which is slightly longer than the original. Socrates committed state suicide by drinking the cup of hemlock, thereby carrying out the death sentence passed by the Athenian polis. John Cage’s poisonous mushroom mess of ‘skunk cabbage’ was a cheap imitation of hemlock.

Adorno said about John Cage and the ‘New Music’ - and then John Cage came crashing into it.... 

Random Time

Random time measured by clocks as the duration of minutes and hours is wrongly called abstract. It is neither abstract nor aesthetic.
The basic mode of time as a quantity is error and inexactitude. Duration implies time as sheer quantity. It can be planned or random. This matters very little. But either way, it is never more than an approximation, hence merely empirical or accidental not necessary — ultimately tainted by those fixed ‘permanent emotions’ so necessary to John Cage.
Paradoxically, the only aesthetically useful emotions are the vague metamorphosing temporary ones. They may be false, but never inexact, inaccurate. That which measures time is not time.  Boredom is a good measure of time in Cage’s works.

Aesthetic time is in the mind and not in the clock. Time as a quality of reality implies the apriori perception that phenomena succeed or precede one another in sequence.

Through the mind’s innate ability to perceive sequence comes the certainty of substance (phenomena).  Substance is that attribute of phenomena which is extended (endures) in time.  One perceives substance as Being.  No substance or art is outside of time.  If it can be perceived it is temporal. Hence it is physically and metaphysically nonsensical to demand as John Cage did that people give him their time.  They could have more easily given him their soul.

What do the Chinese see in the eye of the cat?  They see the time of eternity says Baudelaire.  Time undivided by minutes and hours - “an immobile hour unmarked by clocks, yet light as a sigh, rapid as the blink of an eye(...)” (Baudelaire, “L’Horloge”). In Chinese time there is no ‘duration’, nothing ever passes.  The ghosts are here and the enemies of the ghosts are here.  The Chinese do not measure time with chronometers.  Neither did Beethoven, one of Cage’s declared enemies.  In Beethoven’s music there are vast passages of unmeasured space and time under the ghostly rule of the ever-metamorphosing fugue.  This rule is both light and inescapable - these are the principles and laws of universal simultaneity and sequence referred to as counterpoint.
Then I saw a cat come out of the bushes with a mouse in its mouth, not knowing how to get rid of it.

Some Thoughts on Art Wars

An Exercise in Negative Thinking

A Collection of Theorems for aspiring Futurists to be proved, disproved, ignored or indefinitely prolonged

1.   Topicality is the enemy of art.

2.   Advertisement is the enemy of art.

3.   Education is the enemy of art.

4.   Political movements are the enemy of art.

5.   Art is heresy.

6.   “I think both art and life are a matter of life and death.” — Walter de Maria

7.   “Eventually, over a period of time, the provincial always wins.” — Jeff Koons

8.   The enemy of art is in the eye of the beholder.

9.   The audience is not another artist.

10. Those who choose art are not chosen.

11.  The artist is the audience of the audience.

12.  When the artist looks deep into the heart of the audience he sees himself.

13.  The enemies of art worship Golden Technology.

14.  Golden Technology is the Demon of obsolescence.

15.  The only radical is time.

16.  An actor can never be an artist. 16a An artist can never be crude enough.

17.  When an artist is not himself he can be an actor.

18.  The art world is a teratological system.

19.  All artists are vampires.

20.  An artist can never be accurate enough.

21.  An artist is a door to door salesman who never leaves the house.

22.  Money is not the enemy of art.

23.  Artists use money like other accidents.

24.  Money and art are ancient and ephemeral.

25.  Money and art are abstractions.

26.  The art world is made up mostly of non-artists.

27.  Art does not need an aesthetic.

28.  Aesthetics needs art but afterwards it throws it away.

29.  Aesthetics is the leftover of art.

30.  When art is thrown away it comes back to life.

31.   This is not a manifesto.

 

Generic London

In the sculpture gallery of the Victoria and Albert Museum there is a marble sculpture of an “Athlete Wrestling with a Python” by the Victorian Near East traveller, artist and president of the Royal Academy Frederic Lord Leighton. The sculpture is a variation of the classic theme of Laocoön and his sons. The Leighton figure liberates the idea of wrestling with the snake from its aspect of gruesome divine punishment. The athlete appears to be mastering or conquering the snake rather than being overcome by it. The snake winds itself around the athlete who holds its gaping mouth at arm’s length. The athlete’s figure and pose emerge from the classic theme of Laocoön but is now infused with a new ‘dynamic naturalism’. At the time the work was considered the onset of a ‘renaissance’ in British sculpture called the New Sculpture. Leighton’s ‘Athlete’ is no longer the mythical doomed Trojan priest of Poseidon – he is a generic athlete wrestling with a generic snake, which has not been sent across the sea by a god but just happens to him in nature. Generic is a key to naturalism as opposed to the mythical. Fascism’s mythology is paradoxical being generic and mythical at the same time.

Still, the athlete has not yet conclusively subdued the serpent. “Serpens nisi serpentem comederit non fit draco” (Serpent must swallow serpent to become a dragon) does not seem likely. Everything is rather in abeyance, undecided. The athlete does not hold up the head of the snake in the triumphant pose of a Theseus with the Minotaur’s head or a Perseus with the head of the Medusa. It is a mere contest – and one he might lose. About his expression and bulging neck veins is a hint of desperation. He is not a founder-hero. One is tempted to see this ‘new naturalism’ as a sign of Victorian imperial uncertainty. The empire – the snake – is unpredictable in its movements. Following the wave of revolutions on the continent in 1848 and the “Indian Mutiny” in 1857-59 the British Empire was seen as vulnerable to internal and external forces.

Leighton seems to have been tempting the devil - using the iconography of Laocoön as the ‘template’ for a new imperial mythology. Victoria had crowned herself Empress of India in 1877 – in the same year “Athlete Wrestling with a Python” was first exhibited. Victoria had been an early patroness of Leighton, he sold his first painting to her. He was knighted in 1878 at Windsor. Victorian artists were not autonomous – they were empire artists, promoting the cult of imperial grandeur and dynastic infinitude.

Why though did Leighton choose a mythical armature for his naturalist athlete whose theme is so intimately connected to total disaster – the fall of Troy? One wonders if this was a case of hubris or an unconscious portent of the end of empire - at its seeming pinnacle. Five years after Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India, Britain invaded and occupied Egypt,  to protect the ‘gateway to India’. The map of Leighton’s travels shows his frequent movement between the four empires ruling the ‘East’ at that time – Britain, France, Turkey, Persia. But he certainly would have been aware of John Ruskin’s menacing comparisons of the ‘great powers’ Tyre, Venice and Britain and the dire warning with which he begins “Stones of Venice”: “Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set up upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.” Perhaps Leighton’s generic Laocoön was a gesture of defiance towards the myth of doomed power and its looming possibility? Or was it a staid Victorian predecessor to the Nazi-Wagner cult of Götterdämmerung and Valhalla?

Besides his Arab Hall in “Leighton House”, Holland Park London, Frederic Lord Leighton is renowned for having had the shortest peerage in the history of hereditary peerages. He was made a Lord in 1896. One day later he died of angina pectoris. As he was unmarried the Barony was extinguished. His peerage lasted one day. 

Solitary Lights

1. The panoptic corridor of The Music School leading to the room of the violin teacher is lit up now more often than before. The room though is mostly dark. It used to be the other way around. The corridor is the empty stage. But whenever a figure might appear on stage at any time, then that emptiness is all readiness, not really empty any more. Even if the figure never appears, if something, someone detains him forever. It is still his stage and only his. His light. The burglar light.

Another late night presence - in the humble architect's office over the defunct "Coffee Shop" of the unlucky Portuguese couple a light was on in the stairway behind the frosted glass door and upstairs in his 'atelier'. The office is right on the river Long which runs like a canal under the High Street, so dark and hidden you almost overlook it. You are only reminded by the noise from an occasional water creature on the river bank - the flapping wings of some of the Queen's Swans or one of those itinerant fish-boys.   The Portuguese "Coffee Shop" lasted longer than most fish-boys, but it too was eventually condemned to death by the Lords of 'Überburbia'.  The architect's light was far more solitary than the light at the upstairs window of the veterinarian's. For the architect is deep in the pursuit of some aesthetic truth, if only in the form and content of a kitchen extension or a driveway. The vet's light belongs to the false hope of all such emergency services or to the periodic bachelors who rent the upper room. Odd that I associate the architect's light with work, the vet's with emergency, the violin teacher's with show. It's not odd.

When Cicero was not in Rome some said it was as if Rome itself were solitary. I wonder if they say the same about London when the Queen's away.

2. Why is it considered mandatory or hygienic to read only one book at a time and front to back, cover to cover? Even if you don't, you feel guilty about it. Don't you ever speak to more than  one person at a time or in a day? Such exclusiveness does not exist otherwise in life. Are books still considered more sacred or more deserving of such undivided attention than anything else? Some books can only be endured by reading them together with an antidote. Schubert's "Die Geschichte der Seele" (The History of the Soul) in which he develops his theories of "Scheintod" (suspended animation) should only be read, if at all, interspersed with fragments of Schopenhauer. The only two persons I've met who 'confessed' to not being able not to finish a book no matter how bad (and whom I believed) were a chemist in Jerusalem and a tax inspector in Biedenkopf.

3. Pessoa is most uncanny. How long I've 'known' him already - almost 9 years - and have barely scratched the surface. To think that he hardly ever left his native Lisbon. The life of a bookkeeper is the same all over the world - everywhere it's just a 'voyage around the room'. I had just been thinking about the far too many books open on my desk. At the bottom of a diminutive stack of three was Hume's "A Treatise of Human Nature". I tried to recall what  it was that I'd discovered was entirely missing from his view of human nature. I think - it was the unconscious. Pessoa then, as if speaking in turn: "The only advantage of studying is to take delight in what others haven't said."
("The Book of Disquietude") 

4.  I am most like myself, when I use a line from my writing in everyday life.  Such as telling the two post office cashiers "I have no favorites".   I am least like myself when I use a line from everyday life in my writing  - mostly to repay a secret debt.  Everyday life includes other people's literature - the life which is Swinburne, or Hofmannsthal's love of Swinburne and all those lives containing this fact.  All of them excluding mine.  Feelings though have no concern for the facts.  Feelings invent the facts to correspond to feelings.